Alchemy
by melissaisdown
Summary: Love and sex - when, how, if they intersect - History, photography, ineviability- House/Cuddy
1. Resist

Part 1/4

**I. Resist **

It's happening again.

It shouldn't be. Not after all of this, not now. It's different, or it could be. House is reconsidering.

Everything.

Alone in his apartment, he remembers. The memory of the Amber accident is fading slowly but eventually, obliquely replaced by other fateful encounters, intersections and mistakes of his life. Strangling his cane, preparing to take another another vicodin, waiting for the pain to obliterate the memories now, it only mutilates them like his leg, confirming his inability to ever forget.

It was Christmas.

He was breaking a rule, trespassing into the personal life of a patient, a clinic patient. Her name was on the chart but he couldn't remember it. So he called her Mary and feigned Catholicism. At Midnight mass anticipation was in the air, the perverted atheist still had a little boy somewhere inside fighting for domain over the empty space where his soul should reside.

House knew she was a working girl which aroused him, yes, but did something more. It provoked his curiosity. A pious prostitute, a hooker with a halo, nothing seemed more paradoxical than a religious whore. It was an anomaly and he had to investigate. Bearing witness to a prostitute's portrayal of not just a virgin but the immaculate virgin that bore the child of an entire faith was both entertaining and enlightening.

Ironic.

Curiosity was only part of it. The woman had gotten Gregory House into a church for the first time since Wilson's last wedding. She liked him. That was the true anomaly, the real motivation. And he had to resolve the enigma of her interest. Mary saw his wry grin with a distant gaze and plans were made.

The lack of any enduring consequences is the most appealing attribute of paying for sex but for House it's much more complicated than that. In the real world — that is, the world where sex stems from boy-meets-girl rather than boy-pays-girl — there are always emotional obligations attached, no matter how casual the liaison. Hookers were simple, relationships are complicated. Except this time there was a catch.

He liked her.

Mary liked him. Though 'liking' may not be as ardent a feeling as love or lust it is still an emotion. And emotions are not simple.

_**the dilemma**_

With quaint gallantry House opened the door and let her stride confidently into his dark apartment. Turning the light on, her eyes panned across the place until she found the bedroom. As she took his hand and led him to it House limped more from the erection than the leg (he had taken a handful of vicodin earlier, it was the only way he could tolerate sitting in the pew without blasphemous outbursts).

There was no hesitation or interrogation, certainty and experience but no communication. Mary turned the bedroom light on and he turned it off, throwing his cane aside and attempting to initiate with only an uneven stance. When her eyes adjusted she reached for his belt and for a fleeting instant House felt pitifully pathetic knowing she had done this - removed the belt of a stranger- countless times and with the same superficial enthusiasm.

When the button of his jeans was undone, the zipper unzipped, the man himself undecided, he reached a hand out, just one, caressing and curving around her waist, ascending up under her blouse, making her half flinch and saw an insolent sensuality in her eyes, the same contradiction of flirtatiousness and chastity that he found attractive in the first place. Then she imitated him, sliding her hands around his hips and pushing the tshirt up and off of his well formed solid upper body. The jeans fell, one sock slid off with them. It all happened rather quickly as if the pace of his stripping would negate the handicap of his circumstance.

As if he weren't a cripple.

Hers was a much slower provocative striptease. She took in his glances as he sat on the bed, slipping off each piece of clothing with unexpected eloquence and enjoying each individual stage of exposure. When Mary was finally naked he was left struggling with an admiring gaze in the dark. No shyness, panic or dizziness but there was still unease in what he was beginning to feel.

House, who was leaning heavy on his elbows displaying his engorged erection proudly, his eager exposed body an pale shade of blue, sat up, brought his face to her torso, his hands exploring her back, grazed his beard across the soft skin and brought her down to him. A hand traveled up her leg while he reached for the condom and opened it. Mary took it, wrapped her hand around the base of his shaft and stroked slowly several times before leaning down to kiss the glistening head of the infrequently kissed organ and rolling the condom on diffidently. She took her time and House's last thought was the hourly rate as he brushed an errant strand of blonde hair out of her face with wide open eyes and an unmistakable smile.

When the barrier was in place he found himself confounded by the fact she didn't stare at, ask about or touch his right thigh. She didn't implore about how they should do it. And he was grateful for this, the benefit of the doubt, treating him like an ordinary John who could handle her body in all positions, take advantage of her from all sides. As she straddled him high on his hips House, with a sharp gasp, nearly came at how unexpectedly tight she was. In control Mary was good. Gentle, deviating motion, none of the monotony of the usual no strings interaction. It felt different, like more than a business transaction, more than a purchase, more than a Christmas present.

It was neither slow nor fast, burning nor frigid. It was tepid, want and warmth on a snowy Noel. She rode him with conviction, intermittently humming some hymn, House kept his eyes closed most of the time, his grip around her loose as she rose and fell, respectfully.

The man respected hookers more than he respected his fellow physicians. He respected them for the job they do, no matter the unpleasant, impoverished or desperate circumstances that may or may not attract them to the vocation. It was still their choice. No pity or sympathy, just respect.

While his veneration escalated the heat spread. Mary moaned splaying a hand across his chest and a dilemma arose. As his orgasm advanced he felt compelled to kiss her, press his mouth to hers and achieve a new level of intimacy. It was an impossible desire, a law he could not break. Liminal, he arrived at some threshold but had to resist crossing it.

Other rules he had no problem breaking if he gained something from the crime. Here he would lose something. He'd have to admit she's more than a piece of ass, that he himself was not entirely worthless. It was supposed to be detached, raw, devoid of romance, sexual but not sensual. But as he touched her he enjoyed it, delight if her supple flesh, reverie in the feminine presence. This wasn't cheap and it didn't feel insignificant. It was candid, consolatory and merely a coincidence that it was carnal. As he reconsidered the piety of this prostitute his perspective shifted but the dilemma remained. He could not resign resistance.

Ginger, peppermint, mistletoe and pine, his final futile thrusts were spent on the thought of the true secular agnosticism of the season, the meaninglessness of it all. Religion. Sex. Emotion, just _everything_.

When he came House felt like neither a sinner nor a savior. He simply felt good, for the first time in a long time. Murmuring some indistinguishable word as the pleasure elevated, an invitation he voluntarily and vehemently stifled as soon as he realized he was saying it, he expelled a soft sigh of relief. Before the sensation dissipated he knew he didn't want this to be it. He wanted something more than thirty seconds of joy, to ask her out, to do this again.

But he couldn't.

The only thing more ridiculous than celebrating an August birthday in December, hanging stockings and believing in miracles was dating a prostitute. All intentions beyond that night were impossible. When the pleasure had passed, when she was still on and around him, Mary leaned down, her hair tickling his face as if she wanted to whisper in his ear and kissed him on the cheek. With closed eyes he smiled.

It wasn't the smile of a cynic. It was a seraphic smile. Somehow she had passed the ironic duality, the paradoxical honor, the spellbinding juxtaposition of contrariety onto him. His sarcasm, willfullness, and arrogance were being paired with vulnerability, tenderness and concern.

Ordinary emotion.

Mary lay beside him a few minutes, just legs and toes touching while the heat of that decisive moment cooled in latex against a softening muscle. The pleasure seemed fabricated as it receded and the innate pain returned. His leg, his heart, there was no difference anymore in the dim and silent interlude of the next day's dawn.

House stared at her, without turning his head completely, reluctant to reach for his leg, to let her know he hurt. Consideration or self preservation. Watching her examine his ceiling, he wondered what she saw. In him. He wondered if there was any sincerity in her interest. He wondered if he made her come. Mary exuded an energy as ironic as everything else. Ebullient. As if she didn't just finish a messy difficult job, as if the whole act inspirited or inspired her somehow, as if she enjoyed it. House's eyes traced the profile of her face, uncovering closer majestic highlights and curious still. Even after attaining the desired and needed intimacy he still hadn't solved any problem or puzzle. Feeling slightly less hollow he didn't mind the stranger in his bed and sat up, routinely removed the condom and dressed.

By the time he had finished Mary was dressed and patiently standing beside him. He reached for his wallet and followed her to the door. It wasn't awkward the way it usually was, he was nearly ignorant of his limp, focusing so intently on what he should say, if anything.

With a shy smile and boyish blink he handed her the cash. It was more than he usually paid, twice as much. Not for the carnal but the courtesy, the illicit kiss, a law breaking meeting of her lips and his face, reparations for his resistance of reciprocity.

Mary pushed his hand away, refusing the money.

With a beckoning expression she ensured him he wasn't a patron, "I don't work on holidays."

House grinned appreciatively but was put off, almost irritated by the affectionate esteem. There was too much dissonance, too much _feeling_ in what should be arbitrary. Uncertain what to do next, he briefly reconsidered kissing her.

Instead though he slipped the money into her purse as she turned away and said, "Christmas present then."

Knowing she deserved it just for tolerating him, that she more than deserved it for _liking_ him.

House stood at the door a long time after she left, leaning heavy on his right leg, wanting the pain to distract him from whatever exactly he felt.

Again.

It wasn't love. But it wasn't just lust either.

It was a start.

_**the green light**_

Stacy was the end.

She was the beginning. She was everything.

How they met was accidental coincidence. House with juvenile persistence could not resist participating in the paintball tournament. He dragged Wilson along, flooded his brain with lawyer jokes and and eagerly loaded the gun.

In hindsight he admits it was a great analogy for the start of a tumultuous relationship- warfare a first encounter. Enemies, adversaries, opposing teams, a standoff, the first impression was being shot by each other. It should have been an indication of things to come, he thinks.

But House overcame enemy fire justifying the defeat somehow thinking it was more Romeo and Juliet than man slaughter.

"What's the difference between a lawyer and a trampoline?

You take off your shoes before you jump on a trampoline," was the last thing he said before she shot him. House laughed and unloaded his remaining ammunition. War was declared and continued at dinner.

They talked and ate, the nervousness of reckless spontaneity dissolved into the rare exhilaration of an impromptu tryst. When he took her hand, touching her for the very first time, he wondered if she always wore her crucifix onto the battlefield and tried to rationalize how he could make this work.

They lingered at the restaurant until midnight when they were expelled by an exhausted waitress. Neither wanted to separate but both were committed to not being the first to admit it. The chemistry was tentative and Stacy was left annoyed and offended by his abrasive self assurance and the assumptions he made about her, that were of course true. She didn't want to acknowledge his accuracy or admit her attraction.

Their first date was a catastrophe.

House walked her to her car suspecting he had blown it (the memory of not having the limp is now more painful than the thought of never being with her again), managed one more lawyer joke and stood as zealous as an adolescent about to have his first kiss (_and with the most popular girl in his class_). Stacy scowled, narrowed her speculative brow and turned away before he could make one more audacious advance. The car door opened, hitting his leg and scraping a few layers of skin off of his ankle.

Stacy drove away without looking back, almost afraid he would follow her.

House didn't though. He just stood at the curb as the car disappeared into the distance and accepted the challenge.

The next day, when he had manipulated his way into attaining her address and was certain she was home from work, House visited her. Pounding on the door until she answered, when it finally opened he was inexplicably speechless.

Stacy stood facing him impatiently, smirking at the scenario, arms crossed in an uninviting stance and before her smile could straighten into an lithe line of lips he kissed her.

It was an inimitable first kiss.

Hands clutched and pulled her to him. One rose to the back of her neck, brushing her soft cheek gently with his palm. Each sensation was intensified by the element of surprise. It was warm, wet and right. Extemporaneous and natural. The fragrance of fall floated through serene air under the night's opaque sky and dead leaves stood their ground against the wind. The doorstep was white with moonlight, the breeze cool, their mouths connected and they felt like the only people in the world. The universal law of transience made it a modest embrace. So House deepened the kiss, parted his lips wider, it was still soft, sweet, tender. A chance. Stacy's arms clasped around his body, the first taste of each other was a catalyst. When he broke away to breathe House kissed her cheek, her neck, nudging his nose and mouth into her shoulder and then returned his lips and tongue to hers. When he realized they were making love under a porchlight and in the suburbs he stopped, fixed his transparent eyes on hers and walked past her into the foyer.

They made love that night, several times and on various surfaces of her apartment. Not because they loved each other or were _in _love yet but because they knew what they had was kinetic. It wouldn't be a one night stand. It would be something. Something they needed, something they wanted, an unexpected new beginning.

The morning after, or the third day they knew each other, Stacy awoke diagonal and in his arms, occupying the majority of the mattress. She watched him sleep for fifteen minutes before her eyes spotted a clock and she realized how late she was for work. When she finally got up House's eyes opened aware that he wasn't in his own bed.

"I have to get to work. You can eat breakfast here and use my toothbrush if you want," Stacy said from across the room, dressing and putting on make up at the same time.

House murmured something about bodily fluids and gingivitis, watching her intently as she left. The moment she was gone he missed her. He brushed his teeth. Staring at his tousled hair and criticizing her choice in toothpaste he watched his mirrored reflection. In her bathroom, with her toothbrush, she trusted him to be there alone and somehow he saw this scene as more personal than sex. Then it happened. He fell in love.

The privilege of every level of intimacy was before him. It consumed him and he let it. The man could no longer resist. That night they made love in his apartment and she moved in before the end of the week.

Sex with Stacy was the first House had that wasn't motivated by lust or conquest. At all. It was his first coital connection with emotion.

Love.

Not at first, naturally. "I love you," didn't come until the end of their first year together. But sex became something it had never been. And something it would never be again.

House is certain there's a formula. Some explanation, some reason why it was different then. Why it's bothering him now. Some way to calculate the intensity, the emotion, the pain that will come from a relationship, to define the purpose of a connection.

They lived together for five years. It was his last and greatest commitment. There was a pregnancy scare and before the infarction he began looking at engagement rings, persuaded to do so by the marriage advocate who was his best friend. Before he could propose something permanent he went golfing, got a pain in his leg and was maimed because of a misdiagnosis. And because of his proxy.

He never really stopped loving Stacy but the anger murdered all other emotions. He was different, physically and psychologically. Tragedy and loss only fueled his sarcasm and cynicism. After a while he forgot what happiness was. Eventually misery replaced intimacy, pain desire, and loneliness companionship. House pushed her away and Stacy left convinced he was better off without her. The last woman he ever truly loved abandoned him when he needed her most. After that House took a determinedly pragmatic view on sex and told himself he liked being alone. A library of porn was created, the internet became his bedfellow and his hand was sufficient.

He had a job at least when he finally recovered and the work, the puzzle was all he really needed. Cuddy indulged his obsession and the naked ring finger was less conspicuous when his knuckles were wrapped around a cane. Left with just one thing again, he resigned all vaguely optimistic notions of ever having anything more that had manifested before the infarction.

When he wasn't working House was plagued by insomnia, missing the familiar warmth beside him in bed; Stacy's dark hair fanned across his chest, the smell of her perfume thick in her air, the stack of legal files on the night stand, he would lay on his couch, chase a handful of vicodin down with whiskey and contemplate suicide.

Home wasn't home anymore. Everything reminded him of Stacy. Every room embodied a memory, taunting him with what he could never have again. So he moved. And eventually moved on. Cuddy helped by giving him something to do, Wilson helped by (like alcohol and narcotics) just by being there.

Then one day the lost love of his life reentered his realm. Vulnerable and desperate for help, for her _husband_. There was ineffable complexity in what House was feeling. He didn't want to meet, treat or save Mark. But he couldn't hurt Stacy. And his decision was rooted in selfishness and hope. He saw it as an opportunity to win her back, impress her and remind the woman why she loved him in the first place, find out if she still loves him and let her know he made the wrong choice.

House was fixated on Stacy when Cuddy hired her. Her aura, her charm, her presence all became attainable again. He had been longing for reunion, pining five years and misery finally seemed like a prison cell he could escape. With counterfeit reluctance he played the game. Telling himself he was just doing it to solve the puzzle of how Stacy really felt about him.

Love, hate, indifference. He took what he could glean from her: pilfered therapist's notes, a sink full of dishes, an attic rendezvous and a rat named Steve McQueen. Their mutually mixed emotions and insurmountable unresolution culminated with a stolen kiss in a hotel room, House finally knew how she felt and realized what he wanted. The kiss was a turning point, innocent, impassioned it changed everything. The way it had a decade earlier.

_"Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!"_

From Baltimore on, he was James Gatz, a wistful naive love and the pursuit to recapture it became his new obsession. Gatsby dedicated himself to winning Daisy back and his acquisition of millions of dollars, his purchase of a gaudy mansion on West Egg and his lavish weekly parties were all merely means to that end. Stacy was his Daisy, Mark a respectable Tom Buchanan and House a lovesick Jay, full of forlorn hope. Until he actually got her back.

Sex with Stacy was everything he'd remembered and more, soft skin glowing in the late evening shade, hazel eyes shining as she clutched under him, the flutter of her pulse on his lips, he could still make her come. There was love in it. And hate, passionate polarities. The entire embrace was a brief glimpse of a longed for yesterday. Different with the leg, wrong though they fit together perfectly, as if she'd never been gone, when it was over he still felt incomplete.

Stacy was the green light, a guiding light, a dream of the future. When House touched her though her he knew she wasn't really his. "Did you tell Mark?" He can hear himself asking. Stacy hadn't, and she wasn't planning to. Her hesitation was a confrontation for both of them. House made her choose and the reluctance left him incapable of accepting her decision.

With a willful admission that he could never change House pushed Stacy away again. It was expository deja vu, the end at the beginning. Resisting his own dream, resisting repetition, resisting the future in a world with no present and a painful past he finally let go when happiness was his to enforce. It was both selfish and selfless.

He didn't want to go through the agony of a duped and doomed relationship. Again. And he didn't want Mark to have to go through the same thing he did.

A chapter had ended, a volume of complexities was shelved. It's all a book he can never reopen - published, archived, its pages now just a sad history lesson.

_**the uncertainty of all things **__**(logic and recollection)**_

Wilson told him to get a hooker and he did, if only to reward his complete success in humiliating and debunking the legitimacy of a tattle tail's work. The first prostitute was a distraction, dalliance, a physical attempt to induce selected amnesia.

Paula's glossy lips, like the rest of her, were half his age. As the professional fellated him House still couldn't forget. He kept attempting to justify his refusal of a life with Stacy, tried convincing himself it was a moral sacrifice and not just vindictive rejection.

It was an affair. Lechery and infidelity were not a favorable foundation. Except that really wasn't how they started, it was just where they picked up. Even when he came it was painful, with closed eyes he was still nauseatingly aware that the dark head between his legs was not the one he wanted.

And it would never be again.

Sex thereafter was always rational. With no emotion it was only a vain attempt to reduce the suffering, to feel something other than chronic agony. But his hand and hookers only tempered the loneliness, there was no pretending it was an erotic adventure, just a single aimless hour with an unknown and indifferent woman. No amount of pills or pleasure could challenge what the man retained in his hollow heart. He was always left empty, alone and longing for something more.

Something free, something real, something significant.

Objectively he decided no woman could ever love him again, not now. He's too old, too jaded, too weak to do anything even if she did. Logic revealed every scenario to be impossible so he simply ignored his foolish desires. His last painful possession is the memory of the few women who felt something with him, felt something _for_ him.

"You like me. Why?"

The question he asked Cameron confirming her crush was provocation.

There was nothing likable about him and they as a couple were un_like_ly. He had to find the error in her judgment in spite of the fact that her schoolgirl fascination polished his ego. House admitted to hiring her because she was beautiful and when he elaborated she reconsidered the man and chaos ensued.

When Cameron was an option she filled his masturbatory fantasies. It was fun having her as a possibility and flattering that she considered him one.

They went on two dates. One comic, one tragic but House remained stoic, revealing nothing to the girl begging for a revelation. On the first he confessed to living with someone, kindling Cameron's hope of his capacity to maintain a relationship. The second became everybody's concern, Wilson gave him advice and Cuddy gave her blessing. A corsage was purchased, earrings complimented, Freud quoted. Cameron's blackmail and disillusion left her convinced not only that her boss wanted her but that they could somehow make it work. House couldn't do it, he had to resist the easy opportunity. She was gorgeous, smart and attracted to him but for the wrong reasons. He dissected and crushed her and for good reason.

Cameron defended him but not because she believed in him, or liked him, but because she thought he was defenseless, a charity case. To be with her would be admitting he needed help, to change, that everything about him was fundamentally flawed. After that she was no longer a possibility.

Then Cameron kissed him. It took three years but her audacity was a relief. For his ego, not his conscience. House kissed back. It was a long, wet, meaningless kiss. Surreal until she tried to stab him. Cameron was trying to save him. It hurt. She didn't like the man, just the fact he was broken and was motivated solely by her naive impulse to fix him. House wasn't dying, just trying to feel less pain. And for those few seconds, he succeeded.

Relief became dejection and when he visited Cuddy he took advantage of her confiding sincerity, the truth of her trust. It was a romantic loyalty and honest love for the man. Platonic, almost absurdly unconditional friendship and faith, it wasn't new. He had been her employee for eleven years by then. Cuddy always defended him, perpetually protected him and once she slept with him.

-

But everything is different now. And the same. Thirteen isn't an option and the fact that he realizes this makes him feel obscenely old. With the first team he was their boss, their mentor maybe. But now his role has shifted, there's paternal implication in his renewed identity, his relationship with the new team: Kutner the over zealous foster kid, Taub the high school senior who cheated on his girlfriend but will still take her to the prom and Thirteen damaged, unraveling, he's already defended her on her downward spiral.

He isn't certain who he is to anyone really. Wilson's back, but things may never be the same. Cuddy's different. And the same. She tried, she lost. She still wants to be a mother and he's afraid she's given up so he kissed her, the impulsive need, the dissolution of doubt, the intimacy they've both been deprived for so many years. The pain in her eyes, her hands on his face, the taste, it's all he can think about now. A kiss, what he could never have with a hooker, what he hasn't had in years - meaning, motivation, _her_.

The kiss ignited something, it changed everything. Cuddy, her baby hopes and his role in it all.

"Forget it," he said, now he wonders if she did.

House has been with her for years, half of his life has been spent negotiating, nagging and needing her. She is in fact the longest relationship he's successfully sustained with any woman.

Now he realizes they have something all the others were lacking.

Context.

They've known each other the span of two decades, they have a history, a past. One they never talk about.

But will never forget.


	2. Repeat pt1

II. Repeat _(pt 1)_

Ann Arbor was different.

Ohio, Cairo, Tokyo, House had called many places home but Michigan was the first place that actually felt like it. The nomadic lifestyle he'd endured since birth had finally relented long enough for him to find comfort in committing to one zip code for a few short semesters.

At a cocksure and cogent twenty five he transfered from Johns Hopkins to the University of Michigan, against his will and in the middle of winter, without having visited the campus before his first day of class.

Expulsion highlighted the reputation that preceded his arrival. Unconformity, disobedience and a persevering obsession with solving the unsolvable accompanied the juvenile persona while his anguished attitude assured his fellow students that the great lake state was a sad substitute for the changeless Chesapeake.

By the end of the first day his stature was elevated to heroic and the empire of Ann Arbor founded. The legend, the leader and the legacy were at last born.

Greg House in the middle of the second decade of his existence had a rather angular visage, with chiseled cheekbones, a contemptuous chin and blonde eyelashes outlining the penetrating eyes of a cynic. The innate attractiveness of his passing youth was marred not just by the prominence of his ego but also his awkward gait, a rootless American accent and an abrupt indent in his nose, a scar of the past.

Science was a passtime, puzzles a preoccupation and learning a lost aspiration. In his possession and fostering an unusually artistic hobby was a camera. It was a heavy and archaic 35mm Pentax he had collected years before when his father was stationed Germany.

A life of insecure transience had given him a need for permanence, to capture and hold the fleeting, the intangible, the impossible. Somehow he suspected there'd be a day he wouldn't remember if only because he couldn't forget.

A thick album of glossy snapshots was hidden under his bed and small boxes of slides were spread around his apartment. Photography placated his curiosity. Looking though the lens of a camera was no different than staring down the magnifying glass of a microscope. He used the camera to examine people, frame them from a distance, see something nobody else could.

Once while sitting and brooding in the vast vert vacuity of the campus courtyard on an early spring day, House caught a first glimpse and stood staring through secluded space at a girl coming his way. Already from afar, before it was possible to ascertain with complete confidence the proportions of her body or features of her face he saw she possessed an unmistakable, intriguing and perceptible beauty, that there was a purity and regal aestheticism in her appearance.

A lifetime was lived in that moment, and a camera captured it.

He photographed the stranger, feigning architectural interest in the building behind the girl as she turned her face to the sun sauntering slowly, letting the world around her rush on unnoticed.

When he developed the photo in the university's darkroom that night, he felt for the very first time a persistent pang that would one day return.

The motif of repetition was introduced.

-

Lisa Cuddy the debutante was erudite, prim and pert. Objectionably naive, she was the epitome of a girl struggling to be seen and understood as a woman. She'd went to high school in East Lansing Michigan and Ann Arbor was far enough away to feel like an escape. Rebecca Jenkins was Cuddy's roommate and best friend since the fifth grade. They shared rent and a spacious sublet off but near campus. Becky was an English major and their apartment became a library of literature, love stories and biology textbooks.

_**a parable of a party **_

It was his second semester.

House had followed a symptom and the person who that symptom happened to belong to was in a celebratory mood so he joined the festivities. Inebriation eclipsed pathology and the person and symptom soon were lost. Certain before his first sip that he'd successfully predicted a meningitisoutbreak among the underclass population, he was soon drunk, laughing and in the company of strangers.

The place reeked of cheap beer and sloppy sex and for good reason, they were the commodities being the most thoroughly utilized. Festooned with plastic cups and empty cans, full of haughty coeds with big hair and the blaring noise and low fidelity of music being played on cassette tape, the room was actually quite large but felt asphyxiatingly claustrophobic.

House found himself stumbling, fumbling and still searching for the symptom as the night progressed. He didn't socialize, except to impress freshmen with his capacity to drink and the duration he could hold his breath to do so.

Lisa Cuddy was a face in the crowd of her own apartment. Nobody saw her, including her thirsty future diagnostician. She attempted to mingle, make friends but horny frat boys collectively ignored their polite hostess. Once that night she thought she saw the legend himself but dismissed the possibility knowing Greg House would have no reason for attending a party comprised of underclassmen.

At nineteen she was neither innocent nor brazen. There was an alluring quality about her stance but wide and starry eyes kept her from seeming as provocative as she would have liked.

She'd heard of House, his story of being expelled for cheating was an epic among med students, a few of which she'd already made acquaintances with. There were exaggerated stories of the anarchy he'd introduced to the labs and classrooms and a gambling pool with people betting how long it would take for him to be kicked out of another school.

Late that night, or early the next morning, people began vacating, going back to dorm rooms and disappearing into the labyrinth of campus structures. House was not among them. A few hours earlier he had staggered into the bathroom and returned the alcohol to its rightful owners, regurgitating so violently that he hit

his head on the toilet and suffered a porcelain concussion, passing out from the combination of exhaustion, booze and trauma. Because of his notoriety everybody who used the bathroom the rest of the night ignored him.

Morning came too soon for every uninhibited participant of the party, especially those still remaining in the apartment. Cuddy awoke in a strange state on the couch, not recalling why she hadn't made it to the bedroom. Becky was already awake and reading. The future administrator rose, squinting with a migraine and reached for the coffee.

"Last night was so not worth it," she said sipping.

"It's your own fault you didn't get any, you have to be more aggressive."

Cuddy ignored Becky's statement, only half awake and not conscious enough to justify her chastity by explaining the lewd, rude boys who came last night weren't worth the loss of sleep nor did they deserve the exquisite sweat and sex only she could offer them.

"I have nothing to wear," changing the subject.

"It's Friday just wear what you have on." Becky said.

"This shirt, maybe. But these are my party pants. I can't wear them to class."

"For God's sake Lise-"

"Partypants, got any more towels?" An abrasive tenor interrupted.

Startled, she turned around to see a hungover Greg House hovering in the doorway of her bathroom.

"I seem to have saturated these ones in an attempt to hide the puddle of puke I passed out in."

Cuddy walked toward him, stopping and holding her breath before sticking her head into the bathroom to experience for the first time the acerbic smell of alcoholic vomit in the morning. Then she retrieved more towels from the linen closet and cleaned up his mess, destined to do it again countless times more. She didn't mind it, telling herself she'd better get used to the disgusting before it becomes her job. When she had finished mopping the floor with terrycloth she sniffed, still smelling the sharp repulsive odor. It was him.

"Take off your shirt," she said, suddenly awake and with suggested aggression.

House obeyed peeling the stained tshirt off and cocking his head as he tossed it away.

"Your turn Partypants."

"Stop calling me that," she said seriously, slapping him with an extra large wolverine shirt she had never worn.

Secretly, she was starting to like the nickname.

"Though '_Doctor'_ Partypants doesn't sound quite right. More of a corporate or administrative title. Have you thought about getting an MBA instead of an MD?"

The words suddenly united into a significant testimony about his character and foresight. The statement felt ominous, it was after all, a summary of their vicarious roles in the future.

"I've wanted to be a doctor since I was twelve," she defended.

He squinted and considered.

"Well, a childhood aspiration, the most necessary factor for success in the pursuit of any career, _especially_ medicine."

Unaffected by his condescension she threw the rest of the towels in the trash. House grabbed a bottle of tylenol from the nearby shelf and dry swallowed a mouthful, struggling to recognize her. Something seemed familiar.

"How did you know I was PreMed?" Cuddy asked.

"Caduseus sticker on your medicine cabinet. It's new. So I knew one of you two were PreMed. And (pointing) it didn't take long to deduce that it wasn't Virginia Woolf over there," he said, now just a clever smirk, and bright blue eyes.

House wanted to kiss her, if only to continue with his impressive first impression. But he couldn't and was gone before she could respond. A covert curiosity lingered, he already longed to see her again.

When he made it to his apartment, before he even showered, House searched for and found the black and white print of the girl he photographed earlier that spring. He turned on every light and scrutinized the picture. It was her. Lisa Cuddy the immaculate nineteen year old who embodied everything he thought was impossible, who provoked his curiosity, whose aura emanated truth.

The party had been a parable for the power of beauty. When House had seen Cuddy for the first time under the illuminating shine of the spring sun and across from him on the grassy horizon he was so affected that he didn't actually see her. Beauty created an opaque veil concealing the girl's identity, making her semblance indescribable, vivid and vague at the same time. If not for the photograph he'd never have realized or remembered who she was.

After class that night, for the first but not the last time, Lisa Cuddy masturbated to the recurring image of a shirtless, cocky, condescending Greg House. The first boy (even at 26 she thought he could only be described as a 'boy') she met at school who piqued her interest and seemed worthy of the effort. It was frustrating and slow, the memory graphic, the sound of his voice repeating the nickname almost audible. House was a celebrity at Michigan, an energy she'd finally encountered. After several vain attempts to study

she retreated to the bathroom, that was fantastically floral in an attempt to mask the beer puddle stench, relaxed in the tub and tried to think of anything but the egomaniacal bastard. Perhaps he liked her, his personality wasn't as appalling as she'd expected, the thought of a hopeful schoolgirl. Fingers found the sensitive spot submerging below bubbles, nails teasing and spreading, her palm circling until a few fingers slid inside and she squirmed in expectation of the orgasm she imagined he induced and was certain he instigated.

It was harmless. For a few minutes with the help of her hand she fantasized about the older, dark and tall unattainable genius wanting her. Little did she know House was home alone doing the exact same thing under the scalding downpour of a shower and with a picture as proof.

Reunion was inevitable.

They both attempted avoiding each other so much that they were bound to collide in the awkward gaping affectation of two people doting on each other from a distance.

It was at the laundromat. Inside a cubicle of washers and dryers, the most underappreciated collegiate necessity, with a stack of dirty laundry and a pocket full of quarters, House swaggered late one night to find he and Lisa Cuddy were alone and together. Marching over to her with the laundry basket in hand,

"Time to wash the party pants?"

Though she knew it was coming, a quick smile filled her face.

"That and the vomit that seeped into my rug."

"So it'll be more of a burgundy than a magenta now," he said and then looked at her. She wasn't expecting an apology so he surprised her with one.

"Sorry."

"Why were you at the party anyway? It was mostly underclassmen."

House smirked and stepped closer.

"Somebody told me one of the girls hosting it had a really great ass."

Cuddy rolled her eyes.

"They were wrong. Boobs are pretty nice though," his eyes finally breaking free from her breasts.

A beat.

"I followed someone there."

"Jailbait coed?"

Matched contenders.

"No. Male caucasian, eighteen, cough, stiff neck, sweating. Probably from the fever he had- symptomatic of meningitis."

"Someone with meningitis was at the party? In _my_ apartment?"

"That's what I thought."

"Why the hell didn't you say something?"

Raising his hands to impersonate scales,

"Free beer...epidemic... I have priorities." Then,

"Turned out it wasn't meningitis. But little Johnny hornball _was_ sick."

"What was it?" She asked, folding clothes as slowly as possible.

"Nothing you would understand. Big long medical word."

Cuddy stopped and crossed her arms.

"He was in my apartment, I have a right to know."

"Okay I'll tell you. But you have to tell me something first. "

"Fine. What do you want to know?"

"Are you going to go to med school?"

"Yes. I've been planning to since-"

"Since you were twelve, I know. Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you want to be a doctor?"

"What do you care?"

"Because beautiful girls don't become doctors. They may think that they

want to be doctors, until the first day of med school and they realize it's not just all stethoscopes and tongue depressors. It's blood and entrails and needles and vomit and years of studying and suffering, sacrificing a personal life for long hours alone, it's ten defeats for every victory. You're going to have to work that stunning little ass off for years before you get what you want."

Recovering from the resonating rush of having been called beautiful, Cuddy found his reality reassertion elegant and audacious. It was more than flirtation, prospects had been created with his inquiry.

"Do you really think I shouldn't?" Suddenly insecure.

House shrugged. A long quiet beat.

"The kid had the flu," he finally admitted, the moment demanding honesty.

"And a stiff neck from a night of headbanging- Def Leppard concert."

Cuddy nodded, aware that he still never answered her question and handed him a fabric softener when she saw he needed one.

"Infectious disease is going to be your specialty right?"

"One of them."

"Diagnostics is difficult. I mean meningitis alone could be misdiagnosed as a million different things."

"Great differential, love the specificity," he said as he washed the same load twice, justifying it with those 'tough puke stains' but really just wanting to dissect her a little longer, to be with her, though he'd never admit it.

"What about you, what will Dr. Partypants specialize in?"

"I'm not sure yet," she told him as House jumped up on a washer, fascinated still.

They ended up sitting beside each other, drinking Nehi and talking about medicine most of the night. Cuddy was intelligent, interested and not intimidated by him, a triad of all the things he found attractive. Nothing about her was a lie. He was drawn toward her honesty and she was drawn toward his genius, both hoping the other was an exception to every rule they'd ever learned, the magnetism had begun.

As they conversed he saw she was malleable, motivated and not entirely hopeless. Hanging on his every word, almost gullible he was tempted to take advantage of her adoration, to mold the clay, to make a pass. The highest point of his young egotism had passed but his charm and charisma were irresistible, he knew.

It was more than fame or infamy, House was a god at Michigan. As an undergrad at Hopkins he was less than popular. He even joined the cheerleading squad to get closer to a girl and it worked. How many eighteen year old nerds who've read too much Conan Doyle get to have a pretty girl's legs wrapped around their head in front of a stadium full of spectators?

By the time he reached Michigan though, everything had changed. He was popular, confident, he had a clue. House was used to girls surrounding him, flirting with him and sleeping with him just because of his reputation. But this one was different, he had no idea yet how much.

When House threw in his last load, Cuddy, with dreamy drooping eyes, saw a bra in with his laundry and was forced wide awake by the implication that he wasn't single, simply interested in her as nothing more than an anomaly. Rumors assured her that promiscuity was the price of his celebrity. Every emperor had a few concubines and she had no intention of being just another notch on Greg House's headboard.

Neither of them realized yet that they had initiated a convoluted and unconventional approach to seduction. Never would they have suspected then, in a flickering fluorescent laundromat as they accepted complete annihilation of all aspirations [of ever being anything but acquaintances] who they would be to each other now.

As they finished and dawn drew near, House wanted to tell her, everything, some lyric, some line, some_thing_. The truth. But he was no poet, just an amateur photographer- a voyeur, a peeping pragmatist and a picture taking pessimist.

The doors opened and they found themselves on a dim avenue, the morning mist had already fallen. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers and then settled below them so that the shadowy peaks were still in lofty ascension toward the sky.

The college in the distance dreamed on. House felt a nervous excitement that might have been the beat of his own slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing away.

Nicknames and tshirts notwithstanding.

He wanted to kiss her.

Drop the laundry basket, forsake clean clothes and kiss her right there on the sidewalk.

The streetlights switched off and a nearby door swung open.

'Goodnight ' was all his mouth could manage as he walked away unwillingly.

At the edge of the curb House turned and thought he saw the faintest cloud of discontent in her face. Did he disappoint her somehow? He lay awake that night and wondered how much he cared- how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity-whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.

Or just for her.

_**24fps**_

Spring recurred.

A connection reoccurred.

The truth was in a theater, a movie theater. The university's screening room exceeded its seating capacity as film majors preparing to graduate paced nervously before theses began projecting consecutively and in predetermined order. Seats were scarce, many people were sitting in the aisles and some brought lawn chairs.

Cuddy attended the exhibition to see a friend's film. Roy Wagner and she had dated for a while and still possessed an admirable amity for each other, one an ambitious auteur, the other destined to be dean. They shared one mutual friend who showed up late, hungover and searching for a seat, Greg House. Near the front of the theater he found an opening, stammered toward it, sat and found himself beside his future boss and inevitable lover.

Serendipity can be sneaky.

Roy, who was on the other side of Cuddy, was not unlike House except in appearance. At twenty one and ready to leave Michigan for Hollywood, he was a god of his class, determined to be different, to be the best. With light green eyes, black bohemian hair and the beard of a struggling artist, he was handsome. A mediocre personality was compensated by profoundly mundane insights about human nature, the future and cinema, of course. Cuddy had met Roy when he approached her in need of an actress a year before. They slept together before realizing a doctor and director could never commit. House had first seen him in the university's hospital when he was doing an educational stint in the ER. They'd both lived in California and talked about the inferiority of Lake Superior to the Pacific ocean.

Now they were sitting together, an odd trio, neither knowing the connection of one to the other. Well, one knew. Roy sat exhausted, having barely gotten his answer print back from the lab in time to make the deadline.

Once she saw House beside her, warring for more space immediately, Cuddy froze. The various and convoluted short thesis films blurred and she couldn't turn her face from the silver screen. She was expecting him to grab her thigh but all he did was elbow her until she surrendered the armrest. A few films passed. Cliche narratives of the excessive eighties - capitalism, cocaine and contraband, something about ninjas and a black and white effort.

Then Roy's film began.

It was neither a narrative nor a documentary. It was an experimental film, an avant-garde attempt. The concept was clever. He'd taken educational films of the 60s and 70s, about driving, sex, drugs, whatever warnings the government and schools had subjected them to in junior high and high school and he spliced them together with candid footage of his classmates, juxtaposing whichever activity the previous retro excerpts had cautioned them about. It was an abstract pastoral, in a way.

All of the original footage was unstaged, unblocked, untheatrical. And all of the participants were unknowing. Roy filmed his fraternity neighbor trying to parallel park while not sober enough to stand. He filmed his roommate and his girlfriend having sex on Christmas break when they thought he was away (House leaned over at the beginning of the ten minute long scene and whispered in Cuddy's ear "This is my favorite part," lips greasy as he shoved a handful of popcorn into his mouth). The shock of many audience members came when they realized they had all been cast in a parody, privacy invaded, blunders in kodacolor, a humiliating violation.

But not an ineffectual one.

Near the end of the collection of poignant observations there was a scene juxtaposed with an educational film about - education. Emphasizing the importance of learning, going to college, continuing the pursuit of knowledge and all the archaic poeticisms of the 'go to school, get good grades, or you'll wind up digging a ditch,' attitude, the highlight of it came when House relinquished the armrest. His arm rose behind but not around Cuddy with daredevil nonchalance and she smiled. By then she had suspected House knew of her relationship with Roy and was being territorial but he didn't know, he choked instead.

Something familiar was on the screen and he tried to swallow and shout at the same time. House wanted to look away but couldn't. It was shot sometime after the laundry liaison, Cuddy was a sophomore and it was autumn. An ensemble of undergrads had rendezvoused at the lake and House was already there avoiding class and mandatory clinic duty.

Under the deepening set of a burnt reddening sun it was fall and Greg House was falling. In the background, a shadow, a specter, he stood, just a prop in this extrapolating example of what ensues when education continues. A light breeze added constant movement to the cascade of color -leaves on the shore. Staring at Cuddy, guileless and graceful in a ponytail and blue jeans, he had no idea his gaze was being recorded. It was an inspection, an examination, his eyes begging to be seen. By her, not a camera. House was gaping as if he saw his own potential incarnate, as if he had glimpsed all the insurmountable sorrow of the future, as if he had deciphered a secret. She embodied everything that had ever escaped him, everything that in its absence made him miserable, incomplete, consumed by fascination for the girl he'd only spent minutes with. It would be a beloved image of the woman he'd find again somehow, someday, by chance, by ignominious circumstance. It would remain vivid and immutable like a cherished jewel in his memory. Spellbound, his refusal to blink was a fall into love.

In the theater Cuddy watched in amazement seeing something she never expected. A smile stole her lips and House turned his head a little to see a row of white teeth. What was she thinking? Was it a blatant transgression, unintended exposure, involuntary sentimental admittance? Did she see it? Did _everybody_ see it? Or was he just a scrutinizing silhouette out of focus and lingering in the distance?

Without his consent House's arm curled around Cuddy and she didn't have to see it because she felt it. Adductively drifting in her direction, they created a symmetrically perfect pair, a permanent bond as the soft glow of celluloid flickered in a projection of the recent past and precarious prediction of the fleeting future.

There they were, truth, love, together at twenty four frames per second.

_**an affair of phalanges**_

They saw each other more after the movie. Never officially dating, they found excuses to spend time together, to see each other. Sometimes they studied. House became her mentor, conditioning Cuddy for the medical school entrance exam, growing fond of the girl in a way he'd never conceived he was capable of.

A lonewolf at Michigan, House had the privilege of living without a roommate. So they always ended up at his place, they'd order pizza and get sauce on biology books. He'd play Nintendo while she studied for gross anatomy. There was no attempt at seduction, just friendship, camaraderie, flirtation. It was a strange beginning, neither knew what the other wanted exactly or the etiquette that would

help them attain it. A few times he called her Lisa with a lisp only she could hear, another of his flaws she'd come to appreciate if not revere. Cuddy considered kissing him, casually, just to impress him with her capacity for audacity or inviting him back to her place when she knew Becky wasn't there but she never did. They drank and read, their debates became banter and their arguments were always arousing. House had confidence in her which meant something to both of them. But his interest became strictly platonic, leaving him so completely and irreconcilably captivated by her absolute potential that he couldn't manifest the selfishness needed to spoil it. Soon and in spite of himself, he was regarding her with the tender solicitude of an older brother.

If he made a joke she would laugh and touch him, the only real punchline. Wanting to do more than make her smile, House wanted to make love to her, the desire never waned, to kiss her, to make her come. Teach her things textbooks couldn't.

An affair began.

Every night Cuddy would return to her apartment flushed and bothered by the effect she let him have on her. Before she became a doctor, she didn't own a vibrator, her roommate did but she never found the gaul to ask where Becky had gotten it. So like House she was left with only her two hands, ten fingers and the memory of the time they spent together. After a cold shower or scalding bath spent trying to focus on anything but his wry, wicked grin or the or the beauty mark under his right eye or the scar on his nose - perfect imperfections, she would retreat to her bedroom, climb in bed and dream.

It became a ritual.

Under the covers she was moist in all the right places. Tentatively, her hand would wander as her mind wondered about him. The azure eyes that lured her the more she tried to resist them, his broad muscular chest, blond curls in the crossection, the hint of a tan; she'd dream about kissing him, strong calloused hands holding her face, the flavor of his flippancy.

Flicking at a nipple with her thumb, she would find the spaces between her ribs and run a palm over the flat of her hip before sliding both hands between her thighs. Fingers played over slick rose lips teasing as the dream progressed.

Greg House wanting her, kissing her, naked and on top of her, she imagined the fire in his eyes, the escalating urgency of his thrusts, she wanted him to be rough, merciless, make her scream until she was leaking lust. With an achy shiver she circled her clit and pretending it was his throbbing girth, pushed two fingers inside herself.

Loose damp hair swept sleek across her cheek as she arched her back, searching for the perfect position, that spot she knew he would find the very first time. Cuddy tried to think of what the cock of such a cocky enigma would look like but she couldn't get the anatomy illustrations of male genitals out of her head, so she just focused on him penetrating her, what she would feel, not see. As orgasm approached she would always tell herself that the next time she saw him she'd tell House how she felt, she'd kiss him, she had to, it was the only thing that made sense.

But logic always returned, her courage never crested, in her mind though, he was already hers.

Bruising and biting, he'd slam into her hard, impossibly pulsing plunges. Rocking against her palm, the heat, the rush, the intensity of him coming inside her always pushed her over the edge. She'd make him come so hard, so hot, so deep she could taste it. With a silent gasp she came and came again knowing Greg House was responsible and longing for the day of such a powerful connection.

Home alone, House continued the affair of phalanges. When she left after sessions of calibrated and controlled flirtation he would get out an album of matted photographs that he'd taken over the last the year and a half, sometimes with her posing, sometimes without her knowing. He'd stare at them as if they were of girl he'd already known and lost, as if she was already unattainable, just a memory.

Sometimes he'd call her, find a reason to rant about a professor she was doomed to have or give an extended explanation of some lesson in a book. Holding his favorite photo, he'd talk to her and imagine they were together, that he could change, really make it happen.

It was a snapshot. The already fading reds and greens of a polaroid, not the blacks and whites of an Ilford print. He'd taken her out one night because she had complained about the pizza a day before. They'd negotiated. After eating in town he drove to a secluded summit from which they could look down at the collegiate community. House wasn't trying to be romantic, but it was. The early spring sun had sunk behind tapestral traces of trees, bright stars superimposed the violet sky and a transient waft of contentment wandered through their isolated atmosphere.

House stood with wistful restraint having struck his customary continuation of witticisms and youthful pomposity with the always effective weapon of absolute seriousness. After a comfortable stretch of silence he sat on the summit's craggy edge, holding his camera and letting his legs hang and feet dangle in the air. Cuddy gasped at his imprudent choice, the reckless danger, the chances he took that would impress and move her time and time again.

Then he took the picture, framing the fear of losing him as it filled her face balanced by beauty, respect and unexpressed love.

Smiling at the sound of the shutter startling and the flash surprising her, House moved back until he was far enough from the cliff for her to sit beside him. Safe. And she did. Closer, they talked as night fell and Ann Arbor slept. Cuddy's head rested on his shoulder and their fingers twined, his other hand was at the small of her back, if they were going to go down, they were going to go down together.

The only way he wanted to remember her, he'd hold with the phone to his ear, her voice reminding him, reassuring him, that one day, maybe, he could have her.

The calls were always short and justified. Cuddy had no idea they were a masturbatory prelude, no idea that he wanted her as badly as she wanted him. House would sit there after hanging up, his desire imprisoned in denim, he'd brush his palm against the fabric, trying to stave off the inevitable. It never worked, the jeans would be down around his ankles minutes later, the briefs tented and the photograph always in front of him.

It was more than a habit, it was a rite.

The few girls he'd slept with while he knew Cuddy weren't as good as his hand and the picture and the sound of her voice. Soon he was excluding and dismissing all other women, upholding a tacit fidelity to the one he knew he could never really have.

This was all he had left.

The surge of lust between his legs she left him with always started as a slow throb, he'd swell when she was still with him but the moment she was gone it escalated into an agonizing ache, an aggravating rigidity that he depended on. He'd lay back and imagine her innocent blue eyes, soft small hands, a warm flush across her chest, nipples a dark pink, party pants and the taut dimpled cheeks inside them.

Lisa Cuddy would undress for him, he thought, a slow timid tease. She may not be a virgin but she's still a novice, he could be her best.

One night when she was tired of studying, tired of arguing, just _tired_ he'd say, "You can stay here if you want," or something like that. He'd watch her sleep through long quiet hours of night and in the morning he'd wake her up before class with his mouth between her legs, the tip of his nose in her curls and with the flick of his tongue she'd whimper, only half conscious, her body responding to the touch, rocking into his face, as he'd delve deeper just fingers and lips, savoring her sweet surrender.

House stroked his chest, rubbing the hair against the grain, legs sprawling farther apart. The picture was better than porn, it made each scenario real, possible. She was _with_ him. Tremors in his hand as the fantasy continued he'd stroke slow, taking her to the edge with his tongue and then stopping. Cuddy needed him inside her. Rising he'd spread the dampness with his fingers and slide the hard length of himself across her until she begged for it. A pivotal permeation he'd sink in slow, distracting her with a kiss, watching her pupils dilate as they finally came together.

Head canted, lips wet and back arched against the chair, now he was lifting his hips, bucking into his own grip. The craving still wasn't satisfied. The force of his thrusts would shake her, smooth friction and flesh building a barrier between them and reality, her legs would wrap around his waist holding onto him like he was the only thing keeping her in one piece. Dark, sweaty, fevered and panting, there was always a rhythm, one he needed, one she needed to know.

Cupping his testicles with one hand the other pulled and tugged faster. The fantasy and his working fist synthesized as the warm air of the apartment cooled against sweat. He'd make her come hard -clenching, gushing, screaming underneath of him. And he'd keep going until she was writhing again, her heels digging into his back, arms holding him tight, until they were permanently fused, irreversibly combined, perpetually one and then he'd let go. With one last kiss he'd come, filling her, feeling her.

The ferocity of his need finally poured out of him, tangible sticky pearls, a mess on his stomach and hand, leaving him dizzy, lonely and still staring at a photograph.

House was almost aware of the affair. Temporal coitus, the simultaneous orgasms at a distance, he knew the masturbation had to be mutual, he just didn't know if she was thinking about _him_, but he hoped.

After, always after, when the pictures were put away under his bed as he lay on it, House would contemplate about what he felt, brood about what he was going to do about it and wonder if he loved her. He wanted to sleep with her, apparently, but always suspected that love and lust were two separate desires. He'd never really loved any woman that he'd slept with before but he hadn't actually slept with her and he asked himself if that's how it works, if the fact he hadn't yet seduced her, or even tried, meant he was in love.

Alone at twenty six he thought about sex and love, paradoxes and oxymorons, a constant conversation with his conscience:

'What is _sex_ anyway?

Emotional capitulation? Intercourse? A biological imperative?

Is there a difference between having sex and 'making love'?

Sex can be had, he thought, but can love be fabricated, is it just an emotional invention? Does one imply meaning or are people just placating themselves with semantics?

Does he want to have sex with Lisa Cuddy or does he want to make love?

If he loves her already, it doesn't need to be made, so why does he still want to get naked, vocal and coital?

Is there really any purpose other than the pursuit of pleasure or evolutionary impulse to procreate?

The desire to kiss her is more overwhelming than the yearning to penetrate, fornicate, ejaculate...why?

Why kiss at all? Why is the entire process so inherent, so irresistible?

Why can't men and women resist making the parts fit? Over and over?

Is it just a puzzle that pains them when they know the temptation of corresponding shapes and can't connect them?

Is the carnal an excuse for intimacy or intimacy a deluding justification for the carnal?

What's really accomplished, achieved, attained?

Orgasm? That only takes one person, a few dextrous phalanges and a good imagination, he admitted. What's so gratifying about sharing one with a person, experiencing one induced by a person, why does he want her and only her, to kiss, to come with, to make come?

Why does sex feel like victory and sacrifice, a phenomenon when it's so simple, so ordinary?

Is sex selfish? Is love requisite, a symptom or a side effect?

Is it a physical manifestation of existential pandering or an arbitrary exchange insignificant unless a third person is created?

Perhaps sex is more about recreation than procreation, he decided. A passtime, a distraction or an attempt to reinvent one's self. Or each other. Recreate two bodies, fuse, dissolve, transform souls. An attempt to unite, it's nothing more than the denial of the singular. Is climax completion? Rebirth? Combination or failure?

Is fusion, dissolution, transformation -desire- just bad science?

Alchemy.

An attempt to transmute established chemistry- are we just trying to turn base metals into gold with each thrust, each sigh, each drop of sweat, every move that leads to a fleeting moment of rapture?

Are they all just vain, greedy attempts? Forced failures we can only initiate in a state of complete denial?

Is there a way to integrate love and sex? Do they ever intersect without intervention?

How? When? Why?

If this synthesis is rare, if it has limitations, if perhaps temporary and involuntary circumstances dictate the outcome, than surely the opportunity to sabotage a singular success is what's at stake.'

House would fall asleep with the unanswered questions clouding his consciousness. But he'd always wake up still trying to diagnose himself, was he in love or not?

For a while he practiced abstinence as an experiment. In an effort to not think of her, to detach himself from emotion, elevate objectivity, reduce her to just another ordinary girl and prove that he wasn't addicted to her, but it didn't work. They were already friends, they were already connected, they were already feeling something. House was torn between the _desire_ to kiss her (and continue in whatever natural acts that transpire) and the _fear _of tainting what they had.

A hypothesis was formed. House's theory was that if he kissed her it would be the end. Four lips, two tongues, closed eyes and fingers embracing each other rather than themselves, it would also be a beginning. It wouldn't be integration it'd be disintegration. What they have would crumble to pieces and either be replaced by something greater (love) or substituted with failure (vacancy).

Love or vacancy, it was a gamble. Because he'd never felt this way before, because he had to make an objective decision with an inexperienced subjective perspective House chose to believe that romantic love was an illusion. It's not until the end of a long affair or the day a judge hammers a gavel and finalizes a divorce that anybody realizes it. There was no point jeopardizing what they had, they're college students, people don't fall in love that young and expect wedding bells - commencement not consummation- a diploma, not a marriage license. Whether it was out of cowardice or bravery it didn't matter, getting in lovely Lisa's party pants was no longer a possibility.

So platonic it remained in person, lust was a solo activity but the temptation never waned, he was always reconsidering.

_**the key to the past (and future)**_

The apex of their collegiate years in Ann Arbor came the summer between Cuddy's sophomore and junior years. They were together almost every day, librating in the library, playing pool in the university's rec room, or watching St. Elsewhere reruns in House's apartment, the facade of studying had finally faded.

A piano, an old, dilapidated upright grand stood silently in the corner of his bedroom, the wood finish now just a dull luster. It came with the apartment and House kept it, treating the instrument as his own treasure rather than the previous tenant's trash.

One night Cuddy arrived earlier than expected and wandered into the unlocked apartment unnoticed. House was playing, something classical, something nostalgic, all of the torment of his soul confessed through the composition.

Engrossed, she stood speechless. It was more revealing than seeing him naked. Nudity's trite, ordinary, but this, this made House different, no rebel, no misanthrope, he could dedicate himself to more than impossible puzzles. The song that rolled out under his hands was an achingly emotional sonata. Cuddy thought this was what it must be like to make love to him, the passion, the concentration, the release. She wondered if he contorted his face when he came or if he just kept his eyes closed like this. She wondered if his body stiffened in the moment of impending orgasm of if it just flowed through him like the music. She wondered what else he could do with those long talented fingers.

In her mind she could see them making love to this song, whatever song it was, just as easily as she could see them getting married to it. It was their song. This moment was theirs, the connection, the communication, it was a contract, a commitment, a wordless confirmation. It made her homesick for a place she'd never been, something she'd never had and everything she never will have.

Distracting, beguiling, overt and aggressive, it was like really good sex, fleeting and evocative strokes of keys, a tragically evanescent crescendo, the music was liberating him from loneliness, in the piano there was a perfect peace and she saw him, really saw the latent vulnerability of the man, the boy, the soul making itself heard.

Staring the parameter of the room away when she was first seen Cuddy was the one surprised, not House. Cocking his head he stopped playing only long enough to signal her to come sit by him and with a grin she eagerly obliged. The bench was unsteady as she sat at his side, the instability of three of the legs was somehow an inspiring handicap. They were comfortably close when House played another original sequence of keys and then had an epiphany.

"Play with me," he said, making the arrogant and accurate assumption she knew how.

The invitation preceded a chord that fit the mood and he began encouraging it to grow. Tinkling into a second progression, then a third, he felt a song coming on. As he made the decision of which track to serenade her to, he stopped, rested a hand on her shoulder, trailed down the arm and arranged her fingers on the keys, murmuring something about her remembering this one. Goosebumps prickled her collarbone and naked forearms with his warm confident touch and she longed to feel that warmth again and again, all night.

A ballad began and House swayed sardonically with the music, their thighs aligned and adjacent, their elbows in humerus collision, Cuddy didn't play at first, insecure though she recognized the piece.

Chopin, she thought, struggling to remember the name of it, completely captivated by the intensity incarnate at her side. Sweat swam down his brow, hips rocking, foot on the peddle pounding out his troubles, his doubts, there was a tender rage in the contradictory concerto.

When he seemed the most lost in the rhythm, a hand glided across the keys and House's palm covered hers, tracing pale thin fingers and fabricating a facile practice session of scales before starting again into the somber classic.

The sound was love in search of a word.

As memory reminded her she gradually found the right keys and they initiated an impromptu and intimate concert, two measures at a time. The fingering, speed and chords were frustrating and difficult but Cuddy pushed through it, afraid of disappointing, aware that more than anything she wanted to collaborate with the genius. Condensation beaded her arms, neck and chest as she surrendered her soul to the music's cathartic cadence, a melancholy soundtrack to her schoolgirl smile.

"Wait for me,' she begged screaming over the cacophony.

"I am waiting for you," an indelible romance in the words, he stopped to gaze at her a moment but started again slowly.

With a peripheral glimpse of his beautiful hands she pressed the wrong keys and the music clashed. House improvised and at the sharpest refrain of noise, Cuddy's foot slipped out of her shoe and scaled his thin muscular calf, an unexpected beat. He stopped playing when she leaned over and kissed his cheek, the edge of his jaw, her hand on his thigh trying to redirect his energy.

An ephemerally femoral grasp on the muscle she'd one day remove.

Sex with House would mean something, she knew, right here, right now. More than humid trysts in the backseats of cars, more than a prom night promenade with a high school sweetheart, more than she's ever known.

It would be a revelation, he wanted her, she wanted him, it was inevitable, it was time. She couldn't bear being alone together any longer without kissing him, holding him, making love to him. The passion of the piano inspired pursuit, the melody was an invitation, her hand advanced to his inner thigh and her lips approached the corner of his mouth but House jerked away, wincing.

"How about something else from my extensive repertoire," he said, with an effort to remain flirtatious.

The surreality of sitting at the piano with a campus legend she adored escalated when he started into an almost pithy rendition of chopsticks. Not as dejected as she would have expected, she started on her side of the keys and was giggling by the end of their duet as his eyes finally found hers. Feeling suddenly assailable he looked away first, bowing his head to see the learning curve of her long fingers, porcelain on ivory. Incapable of articulating with words what needed to be said, House took her wrist, bringing her hand to eye level and staring at her lips he kissed her palm, closed his eyes and let his mouth linger.

When he let go and Cuddy put her hands back into her lap House started playing again something slow, something soft, the sound of their souls' strife. She rested her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes and listened.

They saw their future in the moments that followed, everything they could be, everything they would be but they didn't see what they already were.

The night was far from over and the close call with the carnal was amplified by every chord he chose. They both heard it but knew it'd passed and were somehow satisfied with the simple act of sitting together.

Before she could fall asleep Cuddy saw his camera on a table beside the piano.

"Why photography?" She asked, still drowsy.

House stroked her back gently before leaning away, reaching for the camera.

"Lenses don't lie," he started.

"People do."

"Not everybody," she said.

Taking the lens cap off, adjusting the aperture, House didn't blink or speak, wondering what comes next, holding the camera like a crux.

Then he pointed it at her, closing his left eye and depositing his right behind the viewfinder.

"Do you see the truth?" Cuddy asked.

"I see...

You."

In the echo of his observation a permanent nostalgia was born and he took her picture, knowing it would be the last.  
A portrait of their past, of their potential, it _was_ the truth, the future, a framed regret.  
Photographic memory, the only thing it could ever be.

-

When Cuddy finally made it home that night Becky was still awake and green, reading and envious, in the corner of the room with just a booklight, she startled her roommate.

"Where were you?" Becky asked casually.

"House's...house," she answered, too tired to make sense of the double entendre.

"I don't know how you can spend so much time with him, he's a jerk."

"He's not a jerk...okay he is.

But he's not _just_ a jerk. He's complicated."

A beat.

"Most people aren't," Cuddy continued.

Pointing to the book in Becky's hands,

"Why do you think writers write about the human condition?"

Cuddy asked and elaborated,

"Because most people aren't human. They're shells, silhouettes, dopplegangers.

Nobody ever really is who they think they are. Because they're trying so hard to be what they want to be. Or what others want them to be. But House...

House is House.

He doesn't care what people-"

"You're in love."

"No," Cuddy countered quickly.

Then she reconsidered.

"I just admire that he doesn't care what people think. He knows what he wants.

He knows who he is. I wish I were half as certain."

"He's an arrogant narcissist, he'll objectify you."

"He's a doctor," as if that justifies everything.

"Did something happen between the two of you?

Did you _sleep_ with him?"

"No," reluctantly.

"Then why are you defending him?"

A long quixotic silence.

"I don't know," and in 1986 she didn't.

-

Greg House was more of an anarchist than an alchemist. Zebras not horses in the form of chaos and suspicion, by just knowing more than everybody else and not trusting anybody, the imperceptible became obvious.

Except he trusted Cuddy, not at first and not intentionally but the trust was what he likened most to love. It was the feeling he had with her that he never had with a woman before. It was what he was afraid of losing. The trust, the loyalty, presence and dependence, what they had was different.

With a misspent youth in search of and never finding himself, House discovered something in her. Something about himself, something he wouldn't be able to see or might not even possess without her and he didn't want to waste it because without her he'd have lost some fraction of his identity, some part of himself that he didn't hate and that wasn't miserable.

Cuddy was his foil, a mirror image that seemed to enhance his own self perception. It was around this time that House realized that in every man and woman there is a schizophrenic sense of self. One part derives from flesh and blood and genes, the meaty, bony, hairy stuff of physical substance. The other half is a result of the picture reflected back to us by those who surround us.

In her he had finally and inadvertently found his other half.

_**dreaming of dreaming**_

One night it finally happened. The fantasy, the dream, the idealized erotic scenario became reality. Cuddy fell asleep in his apartment. Quietly, she dozed off on the couch just after midnight. He returned from the kitchen to see her sitting there, peaceful, trusting, dreaming and more beautiful than ever.

House picked up the book in her lap, turned the TV off and stood staring for a while. He wanted to sit beside her, put his arm around her and fall asleep holding onto each other, but at the moment he had no greater fear than her waking and leaving. Still he had a choice: kiss her and initiate what he knew they both wanted or go into his bedroom and still have a friend in the morning.

After careful consideration he covered her with a blanket and sat on the floor in front of the couch, his eyes level with her bent denim covered knees, he yawned and rested his lips low on the side of one thigh and fell asleep hoping that if he can never have her, that he never wakes up.

Several times that night he woke for brief moments, just long enough to experience a glimmer of consciousness, the incongruous shapes of furniture, the dark empty space of the room, the girl by his side.

It was in these indescribable moonlit intervals that reality was only a dream and a dream his only reality. She was there, the girl he'd photographed semesters earlier, now she was with him, or could be, his temple grazing her knee, his fingers cherishing her toes. 'Lisa,' was her name, an abbreviationof Elisabeth, Hebrew, it meant 'God's promise.' And she was a promise to him, a promise of a past, a promised presence, in his apartment, she was a promise that could never be kept.

In this dream he tried to find himself inside her but it wasn't simply sexual. There was no emission, just nocturnal affection. They were both adults he knew, they looked the same but there was a sense that time had passed. The emphasis was on the kiss. Their first kiss, the event, the exchange, the inevitable. It was in this dream, the dream of a dream, the dream of the desire to kiss her that House subconsciously and sublimely discovered what, if anything, connects love and sex- the physical and the emotional,the petty and the profound, manifestation and imagination- a kiss.

The kiss is a first attempt at sincere affection. It's effort, it's emotion, it's the essence of the equation he's trying to formulate. Lust, love, passion and the platonic- they _can_ assimilate, intersect, coexist and they do if only for the brief embrace when noses are nigh, lips are touching and two people are holding their breath with closed eyes.

The thrill was in the kiss. House was right, if he kissed her everything would change. They'd be propelled forward, forced into an intersection where they didn't have the option of turning back or the privilege of seeing what was ahead of them. In the dream he kissed her. With a quiet caress of a cheek he drown in the cerulean sea of her eyes for oblivion's eternity and when they closed his lips finally fell onto hers. A tepid temperature and the taste of love's trinity, heart, soul and body, it was an endlessly fleeting first kiss. House was lying on top of her, his thumb stroking the shape of her smile, his breath filling her mouth, her tongue tracing his teeth, it was warm,it was wet, it was real.

With a lace veil beneath them they were naked, silent, together but their lips had to part. And so their first kiss became their second and their thirduntil they were breathless, gasping, chemistries combining. He kissed her forehead, long lustrous lashes batting against his chin, he kissed her nose and her neck. On her shoulder he found freckles and kissed her for each one he counted. A humid gust spread over her chest and his tongue trailed along Cuddy's collarbone. Slowly his mouth mapped her abdomen as fingers played etudes across her ribs until he settled with his chin below her breasts and looked at her. Grinning, he kissed a hip and ascended meeting her mouth with his again.

'I love you,' he heard a voice say and hoped it was his.

Her hands held his face and the reality of unrequited emotions was released, in one fluid thrust everything unsaid became internal in a different way, he was inside her. House's unconscious mind interpreted the thought, or the image, or the experience of penetrating her as an orgasm. Pleasure, transformation, closure, it was just a dream. His briefs remained dry and his hand held her foot as they slept. In the dark apartment as twilight transitioned into dawn, his mouth was open for her kiss and his was body aching from the strain of bracing himself above her. Her presence filled a void and he filled her. There was nothing outside the dream, no world beyond the kiss.

-

With House's head leaning heavy on her leg Cuddy opened her eyes. It was the middle of the morning, she was already late for class, but with him sleeping here with her, a serenity, a trust in his closed eyes, she didn't care and bent forward brushing a hand through his hair.

The touch woke him. House curled his fingers around her ankle and gently drew circles with his thumb. She was still here, she was still his. It was just a dream but it didn't have to be anymore. He had to make a decision. Cuddy's hand moved to his shoulder and she yawned.

"I had a dream about you," House said, rising from the cramped position on the floor to sit beside her on the couch. After a few moments of fidgeting and blinking restlessly he eventually settled with his head in her lap.

"What kind of dream?" She asked.

Turning his head he unbuttoned her jeans and lifted her shirt to kiss her belly.

"This kind," he mumbled kissing her again. Warm, dry, welcomed lips drifting across pale supple flesh. House dipped his tongue in her belly button as he stopped to look up under her shirt.

"God you're beautiful," he said to the underside of her breasts, dragging his nose and mouth back down her abdomen.

After a moment of just breathing, smelling her- the floral fragrance, the perfume, the scent of her skin, he pulled back abruptly wanting to always remember the color of her eyes, his head in her lap still, his face between her legs, finally.

Blue, close they were two sapphires. Lavender from a distance. Grey in the dark.

"You should get to class," he said sternly and suddenly serious as if it was only then that he woke and realized the hopelessness of dreaming.

"What about you?"

"I have to take a shower," he said with arched eyebrows as his eyes travelled down to an unprecedented erection.

House stood, stretching and twisting his neck. Cuddy stood beside him, unaware that it would one day be her occupation.

"Greg," she said softly, the unfamiliar name a poignant syllable.

As he saw her leaning in to kiss him, high on a cheek near an ear, his eyes closed tight. In the footsteps that followed he saw nothing and felt only the repetitious sinking of regret. Then an image, a picture of her, a permanent perception, from the dream, from reality -kissing her beneath him, the weakness, the desire, he opened his eyes to see her walking away and finally broke the silence,

"Lisa, do you..." A fallible fear in the interrogative tone.

In the pause that followed he considered his failure. A misdiagnosis. 'If', the sacrifice of comfortable uncertainty for the certainty of rejection. If they did date, officially go steady, have sex and all the creature comforts of a collegiate relationship it would end, the trust would taper, they'd graduate and get lost. What they had was more, more than sex, more than love, more than anything. For the first and possibly only time at Michigan, House resigned to convention and doubted himself. His libido lost to logic.

"...know where my pager is?"

Without the mettle to transmute metal into gold, he let her slip away when she was the closest.

-

The affair continued a while; with fantasies of forfeiture, of overcoming the fear that sex would ruin their friendship, of stifling the hope that sex might redefine expectations, redeem their relationship, recreate a future. Together. Of an untainted commitment. Visits became more intermittent. When they did see each other there remained the long sustained seething maelstrom of emotion beneath mutual composure.

Cuddy moved again, farther from campus and House's schedule became chaotic as the finish line of his arduous education was slowly coming into sight. Eventually they accepted that like everything else in their college lifestyles they were just temporary, transient interlopers in a place, in a time when they both longed for the unattainable security of permanence.

In reality they drifted apart, but in their minds they remained closer than ever.

_**all that could have been**_

In mismatched scrubs House was a lazy, lanky, stolid dilettante. Blue and green and worn out sneakers, he was a protruding figure in the halls of the university hospital. Cuddy saw his Nikes first and was awed by his clean shaven jaw and upward eighties coiffure.

Now a sophisticated junior, she was shadowing a doctor in internal medicine, which House happened to be doing a requisite rotation in. Reunited by arbitrary contingency, they were both elated to see the other's familiar face. This was their chance, their last chance and they knew it.

Alone at the end of the day House stood the same as he always had, a peremptory stature, his back to the world, but Cuddy was different. No longer a girl, now a woman destined to be a doctor she approached him and rested a hand on his shoulder.

"House," she said.

The sight ofher laying naked in his arms always coincided with that scent. The fragrance he first experienced in the movie theater, juniper or jasmine, something he had never known before and might never again, he knew it was her before she spoke.

"Partypants," he said, a bit too loudly.

"They give you a degree already?" Still not looking at her.

"You're like that kid on TV... "

House turned around, bright wide open eyes focusing on her ample and refined cleavage.

"Boobie Howser, MD."

Before she could respond,

"Who are you shadowing?"

"How'd...Dr. Keleman," she answered.

House paused, gawking a little. It was the first time he'd seen her in a skirt. And those legs were a much needed sight for his sex starved eyes.

"Keleman's a moron."

"No he's not, he's nice."

"He treats patients," House said.

"He's a doctor, isn't that what they do?"

"No. Doctors are supposed to treat illnesses, not people."

"He's one of the best-"

"You don't have to be nice to be good," cutting her off.

A beat. She surprised herself by not disagreeing.

"What happened to your patient?" Cuddy asked.

"Lost him."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Why? He didn't die, I just don't know where the hell he went."

A feminine laugh of longing resonated, a sound simultaneous with the realization of just how much she had missed him.

"If you hate people so much what made you want to be a doctor?" She asked still with a gentle smile, expressing demurely and restrainedly a capacity for some sort of eternal enthusiasm.

House told her about Japan with a certain pride in the reflection, about the baraku janitor and his first encounter with a medical mystery. Cuddy tried to imagine him as a fourteen year old boy, pubescent and awkward and maybe shy and found herself nostalgic for him, for the boy she never knew and wishing that she had known him before he accepted his destiny, wishing they had grown up together, wishing they could grow old together. She tried to picture him as a baby and a toddler and an aimless mischievous adolescent, for a moment she thought about what his child would look like, if he ever had one. But she couldn't picture him any older, his youth more than his willfulness, sarcasm or genius was the most necessary trait, the defining feature of his identity, at least to her.

Cuddy wanted to know what he would become, everything he'd ever been, she wanted to still be with him when this was all over and wondered if he felt the same way. Speechless she sighed, realizing she'd been still for a seamless stretch of silence and still smiling.

"What?" House asked, unnerved by her amusement.

"I was just expecting some existentially pretentious 'desire to be God,' not something so mundane, so personal- ordinary real life experience."

"Sartre. _Being and Nothingness_," he said, flatly matter of fact. Then,

"Somebody's added a little philosophy to their PreMed curriculum."

House sighed, the deduction seemed petty.

"Real life is overrated," he concluded.

The words suddenly sounded very sincere and it seemed clear that he was about to commence some cynical polemic about the meaning of life.

Unexpectedly, a question came next.

"What about you, what made you want to be a doctor, Lise?"

The name reverberated in a single and disorienting syllable of surprise. He'd called her Partypants to taunt her and Lisa a few times but it was always with fraternal inflection, never so casual, never so intimate as this new designation.

"I want whatever I do to make a difference."

House chuckled at the cliche.

"Really, Cuddy this isn't a med school interview, you don't have to impress me with your concern for humanity or exaggerate your innate passion for science and sick people. Tell me the truth."

The last words were soft and she contemplated his ability to do that, to change tone, to change meaning with contrast, with context - to change everything.

Hesitation hung in stale air a long minute.

"Cheerios," she said, immediately regretting the simplicity of the statement.

"Breakfast cereal made you pursue a career in medicine?"

"In a way...

My mother first fed my little sister Cheerios when she was nine months old, challenging her to pick them up off a highchair tray, teaching her to connect her thumb and forefinger and bring the food to her mouth, refining her motor skills...  
I've always been interested in how experience shapes development. How a child learns to grasp elementary concepts, to walk or to speak. How humans learn and grow. I've always loved science, and the opportunity to use it to help people...it's just what I'm meant to do."

"So you want to be a pediatrician?"

"No. I just want to be a mother. And a doctor."

"Then that's only part of the story," said House, squinting incredulously.

Cuddy bowed her head, nodding. The dropping of her eyes when he finished speaking, like a sort of exercise in reticence, fascinated him. He felt that they both tolerated something, that each of them knew half of some secret about people and life and that if they rushed towards each other there would be a romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity. It was this element of promise and possibility that would haunt him for years, never dying or diminishing.

"You're right.

My sister was epileptic. When I was twelve my father took us to the Smithsonian. I was standing in front of the gift shop, my sister was inside buying a stuffed dinosaur with her allowance.

She had a seizure.

I ran in but all I could do was watch. I hated that feeling, that helplessness. After that I wanted to learn everything about epilepsy, how to fix my sister, how to save lives. I wanted the knowledge...to be in control, the power of medicine.

I wanted to be a doctor."

House nodded, proud of her honesty.

"And I still want to be a doctor, stay close to research and education, maybe find a position at a teaching hospital," she continued.

"Stay in school forever, sounds like a plan."

"A majority of advancements, breakthroughs and cures are accomplished at major university hospitals. It's where the change is happening, I just want to be a part of it."

House took a step toward her.

"Yesterday and tomorrow but what about today," he said under his breath.

"What?" Cuddy asked.

"You see the world as it is and the world as it could be..."

No longer immune to instinct, he felt compelled to kiss her, it was an irresistible impulse - to lay his mouth on those beloved lips, slam their educated frames together in one last embrace and change everything, forever. Taste, touch, truth, he wanted it all. House leaned in, a cavalier hand rose to her chin lifting to meet her gaze with his, he inhaled tilting his head. Stagnant breaths mingled as Cuddy stood tiptoe staring into the piercing pale blue of his eyes, revealing a balance of wisdom and weakness. Her fingers curled over his shoulder, soft against the cotton of the scrubs as she struggled to keep her balance, rising to him. Tips of fingers combed through her hair and returned to careen across a cheek. Finally he closed his eyes, crossed the few inches of thin air between their mouths and barely grazed lips.

"House," a voice interrupted.

He stopped, brushed his cheek against hers and turned around to see another intern.

"Lewis from Nephrology will be down here in five minutes."

House nodded as the interference passed. Cuddy, confused and cheerless turned and started to leave but he reached a hand out, turning her around and bringing her closer.

"You're going to run a hospital someday Lise," he whispered in her ear, kissed her cheek and he watched her walk away, knowing he could do nothing about it, not knowing if he'd ever see her again.

"Trust me," he said.

And from that moment on she always has.

________________________________________________________________________

In his living room, in pain, in hindsight House realizes it was the epitome of chaos theory. The butterfly effect. A minor change in circumstances could have changed the overall outcome. If they hadn't been interrupted and he had kissed her, everything would be different. There would have been no Stacy, no PPTH, maybe no infarction. If they had kissed they would have done more, dated, married, procreated, divorced, separated. Their lives would theoretically have been inconceivably, unrecognizably altered.

They are who they are now because they didn't kiss then. One instant, one intervention, one inconvenience changed everything. And he chose to let her walk away. Despising the decision decades later, House knows it was the wrong one, but not the last time.

* * *

Thanks for reading, please review.


	3. Repeat pt 2

* * *

Chapter 3/4

* * *

II. Repeat_ (pt. 2)_

Three days.

Seventy one hours. Four thousand, two hundred and sixty six minutes. Greg House spent three days in Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital as a patient, a victim, a Michigan alum. He went three days without seeing or knowing Lisa Cuddy was employed at the hospital closest to the golf course he was playing on when his leg started hurting.

More than ten years had passed since he saw her last and three more days of an undiagnosed infarction.

Then she came. At his bedside she stood a familiar semblance and he smiled, in all the agony, the strife, the pain, an obstinate upward arch of lips. It wasn't a hopeful smile, it was a smile of recognition, of context, of reunion. House couldn't explain it to Stacy, not really, just the 'We went to college together,' snare and then the grimaced look returned. Perhaps nobody saw the smile, perhaps it was too brief to be registered by the two concerned women's eyes.

Time is a biased constraint.

Like love and sex, space and time may very well be conceptually irreconcilable.

Because from that hospital bed the location remained constant but time did not. It reversed and then it stopped.

Doctor Partypants became an endocrinologist. Standing in front of him she looked the same, immediately recognizable, an instant regret. She apologized and went on to tell him the pain was from muscle death. He heard her but wasn't listening. All he could do was reminisce. House tried to think where his camera was, his old Pentax, what had happened to it and his box of photographs over the years. Cuddy said amputation and the four syllables were lost, all he could do was watch her lips and remember.

It all returned vividly, between Stacy's spells of grief and the morphine haze he recalled every moment they spent together. House thought of calling her Partypants, but it never seemed right. He was about to lose his leg, still his interest in her persisted. Nurses talked and he overheard of her success, of the inevitable promotion, of her tenure and stature.

Cuddy's vaunted ambition had always thrived in his presence, now it was subdued, as if she had heard he'd been fired from four hospitals, as if she still didn't think she was a better doctor than him, as if it mattered. Then she put him in a coma and everything changed.

Cuddy never let on. Her worried lip and watery eyes were attributed to her bedside manner still, she was happy to see him. Not under the circumstances, but she had heard of his career's repetitious decline and saw this as another opportunity, for what she had no idea.

Yet.

_**the essence of convalescence**_

After the infarction (and the second surgery) House was irascible. Cuddy was the only doctor who was willing to go near him. Still his attending physician, she also became his nurse. Sponging him, feeding him, inserting and removing the catheter and eventually the bedpan, she also had the responsibility of not just ensuring his thigh healed properly but changing the dressing frequently. She saw him at his worse, watched him suffer and recuperate and diligently did her job.

One day when she was changing his bandages, an accidental erotic encounter occurred between the back of her wrist and one muscle that had already made a full recovery. It was brief, a little pressing back and forth. Pressure, warmth, an awakening. Cuddy didn't blush. And he didn't gasp until it happened again. His inevitable erection was impeding the process of replacing the gauze. The second time she flinched, it was clearly an accident also. She continued examining his sutures, made sure there was no sign of infection and didn't look at or touch the part of him that was truly in need of her attention. As she finished and went to pull his hospital gown down and the blanket up, House grabbed her wrist, pulling her body closer and her hand back down to touch him. Shocked, she initially didn't struggle to get away and her hand was soon under his hospital gown again. He jerked when her dry fingers finally ascended the length of him and relaxed as they descended.

When he let go of her wrist it evacuated swiftly and Cuddy mumbled something about molesting patients as she turned away and started toward the door.

"Please," he managed in an angry, desperate, weak voice.

House hadn't had an erection since the night before he went golfing and now that it finally happened Stacy wasn't there to do anything about it. The constitutional lawyer had been called away to the firm where she woked but could come back any minute. Cuddy knew this.

Partypants was eligible for promotion at the end of the quarter and if she got caught it could cost her that, if not her job. He knew this. They also knew it was her fault he was in pain and her job to relieve it.

The sound of her heels on the tile reverberated and House sighed, closing his eyes and regretting the vain plea. The footsteps stopped when she reached the door and examining her knuckles as they rose for the knob, she reconsidered. Then she locked it instead of leaving, closed the blinds and pulled a seat to the side of his bed. A palm swept across his cheek with restrained affection as she sat. House smelled of disinfectant and hypoallergenic soap, his hair was greasy and coiled, the gray in his beard effaced the youth that had never faded. Running her hand up an arm, resting on his bicep, she waited for a response, a suggestion, but the man couldn't look at her. Cuddy parted his legs wider and tried to rationalize what she was about to do. There was no hesitation, just diffidence, her administrative bravery had yet to be established.

Her left hand ran up his left leg and he winced when she pushed the cotton aside. Finally with a whispered touch of pale fingers the thick rise of his erection curved into her hand, her fist curling around the blunt heat as she squeezed lightly. At first the movement was slow, strong, shallow, certain to put no pressure on the injured leg. His hips swayed side to side and a sound slipped past his lips but it wasn't sensual, only a soft sob. Cuddy stared at his face, a familiar expression, almost fearing that he would open his eyes. He didn't. But dropped his hand down instead, wrapping his grip around hers until it was chokingly clasped. House forced her to stroke harder and faster, knowing the tug would hurt but needing this more than anything. Then he relented, guiding her fingers up and down in a slower, deliberate pump of pleasure. Finally he let go, hoping she had learned the pattern, the sequence and speed he needed.

Cuddy squeezed tighter, marveling in the suede softness of his skin stretched so tightly over the rigid shaft. Heat radiated off of it and she could feel the bulge of veins as he kept growing in her hand. House hardened more as she continued in predetermined variation, quickening the pace again while watching him sweat. A miserable, atoning kind of sweat.

Cuddy wanted to kiss him.

His lips, his leg, the throbbing glory of him in her grasp - she just wanted to kiss the man and make him better. In an attempt to quell this desire she finally looked at him, really stared at the gorgeous muscle in her left hand. She'd seen him naked before, this wasn't a new sight, but to see the turgid length, hard, hot and in her control was different. Cuddy slowed again, almost mesmerized by the discovery of a new aesthetic. House was intact. The first uncut man she'd had the privilege of fondling. Being Jewish limited her foreplay with foreskin and at that moment, whether it was because it was different, or in her possession, or just because of whose it was, she decided it was the most beautiful encounter with anatomy she'd ever had. There's no room for beauty in science. Medicine is arbitrary and artless. Interaction with patients is mechanical. In her hands though she found something incredible and dedicated herself to it.

The sound of House's breathing amplified and echoed, almost inspiring her and his vitals alternated in escalating intervals of arousal. With an EKG beside them they both audibly gauged the approach of his climax. Though not in complete control he held back, resisting when he felt release advancing too quickly. He wanted this to last, for the company, for the endorphins, for the absolute denial of the brevity of pain's absence.

Occasionally she'd introduce her other hand, massaging his testicles, tickling his perineum or just doubling the direction and strength of each stroke. The woman was a natural.

After a while he stretched an arm out in a desultory reach for her breasts, to grope, to feel her in a way he never had. Cuddy wanted to lean in, to give him what he wanted but she didn't. Instead her right hand found his, sweaty palms and tense fingers weaved together as his pulse slowed and the man relaxed. If it weren't for a few quiet moans she wouldn't have even known he was still awake.

Comfortable, Cuddy began contemplating, her hand glistening as she watched each calculated caress with unbridled expectation. Seeing the transparent fluid slowly seep and saturate was the exaltation of biology. For a while she considered taking him in her mouth, to lap and sample the flavor with her tongue, savor the skin, feel his pulse on her lips. He deserved her throat not her wrist, for her to swallow the salty sweet substance, taste him, kiss him, suck, lick, finally make unadulterated love to the man, the memory.

As Cuddy held him she felt as if it was actually his heart in her hand. One organ, one muscle wasn't so different than the other. The vitality, the throb, the color. For a minute medicine interjected in an educational recitation that like the heart, the penis was a midline structure with an intimate relationship to the peripheral vascular system. Then she dismissed facts, blind to physiology she was witnessing so much more. Supreme vulnerability. Weakness. Susceptibility.

House didn't just need her touch, he wanted it. To feel alive, revival, his life in her hands as it was once already. The crimson hue, the heat, the tangible essence of the man at her mercy was breathtaking.

Cuddy's strong devoted hand beat his heart for more than an hour. Bliss was building for both of them. But only a temporary elevation, ignorance of the circumstance. House shifted, squinting, wanting to see her splayed hand stroking him, wanting to see her face when she made him come, wanting to see if this was having any effect on her.

It was. The scent of each other's sweat coalesced, the motion of her hand was perfect, a smooth friction that had him subtly bucking into her grip. With a deviating twist and jerk of her wrist he writhed more. Seeing him squirm made her nipples impossibly pert and soaked thin panties with her muscles struggling to suppress an involuntary orgasm from the flood of spontaneous stimulation. If her right hand weren't holding his she'd have been rubbing her clit, curling into herself and pushing in time with each sweet stroke. Cuddy swallowed hard, focusing on the rise and fall of his chest, his hand fisted and squeezed hers tight, letting her know he was close.

They clung to each other like this, hand in hand, hand on heart, it was willful reliance, an almost romantic trust. It was attachment, attraction, love unexpressed.

House tried thinking about Stacy but he couldn't, only the woman relieving his pain. A nineteen year old Lisa Cuddy and this moment. How she would taste with her mouth on his, what it would feel like to be inside her, everything about the way he'd make her come; a breathless surrender, the weight of her body riding him, the constricting clench of muscles as he'd thrust through her orgasm. Exhausted, he came with that thought, seeing the image with his eyes wide shut, having only darkness and the belief that this was more. That it could be more.

A white, thick, organic stream spilled out of him in static silence, a warm sticky sap covering her hand and his stomach. Followed by another. And another. Dripping off her palm, running through her fingers she kept stroking, admiring the oozing diluted remnants minutes later and still holding his hand.

Urgency dissolved into consolation. House held his breath wanting to open his eyes, to say something, to shake her talented gratifying left hand, to kiss her. And thank her the contact, the company, the confidential confession.

But he couldn't.

A sudden pang of shame repressed his heart and muted his voice. It wasn't regret. As the pain in his leg ravaged his soul again he realized she was as responsible for it as for the release. House was despairingly uncertain how they went from the promising potential of classmates to doctor and patient. A girl he had once loved from a distance, destined to remain platonic, a woman he had respected, destroyed him. It was the only way she could save him. She'd always worshipped, trusted, loved him in an unrequited triad.

Now she was jacking him off. It was humiliating, nauseating, depressing. A woman who he'd fantasized and longed to make love to for years had finally submitted sexually and it was appalling. Irony, agony, an atrocity.

He practically had to beg her to jerk him off. There was no seduction, no pursuit, just an angry desperate plea. No love. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.

It never is.

House let her credulously clean up the mess. It was brief but thorough, ensuring no embarrassing evidence remained should Stacy or a nurse make an unexpected appearance. He softened and shrank in her touch as easily as he had hardened and grown. For an instant, in spite of fact he couldn't see her, as Cuddy ran the warm rag and her hand back up his left leg, he could have swore she kissed his knee. And for an equally short and uncertain duration, he pressed his palm and a few grateful fingers to the small of her back. But she couldn't have felt him through the labcoat. When she finished and turned he watched out of the corner of his eye as the dedicated doctor washed her hands. She didn't seem disgusted or repulsed, just beautiful, aged perfection.

A sophisticated memory.

After a longer inspection he decided the labcoat was like a military greatcoat. Cuddy turned around and her solemn sapphire eyes saw him blink. But she didn't speak. She was a soldier in body and spirit. A sad and loyal soldier, a soldier tired from long marches, a soldier who doesn't understand the sense of an order but carries it out without objections, a soldier who goes away defeated but without dishonor.

If she felt something it was a lie. And his fault. How could she possibly feel anything? This was out of guilt, pity, remorse if anything. There was no nostalgia, no mention of yesterday. A brief reconnection, maybe.

The infarction was a dismal excuse for reunion and this was a dismal repercussion. He wanted to feel something, he wanted to say something, for this to be entirely different. He wanted to know then what he knows now so that he could have done something with Cuddy before it became impossible, before it was a relic, a myth, a memory.

-

Stacy did return. There were a few futile months of her saying 'Don't rush it.' Through recovery he hated Cuddy. He hated her because he couldn't hate Stacy, the loyal proxy with black eyes full of unshed tears never doubting she made the right choice. The guilt, the screaming, the sex were a punishment. Every night he'd get in bed numb from narcotics and she'd try to reward him, reassure him, insincere kisses, fake orgasms, lucid lies. Each session confirmed his inadequacy, all the positions he'd have to forfeit, somehow in the dark he was more aware of the deformity, the agony, the permanence of his loss. House struggled through it always, knowing she was doing it out of a perverse duty, justifying her decision by proving it didn't change anything. Except it did.

Sex became an obligation. With Stacy it was burden. He didn't love her anymore and wasn't sure if he ever could again. When he came it was always to the thought of Cuddy. He needed to escape the reality of Stacy's blame. Telling himself it was hatred, denying any other emotion he fixated on her devoted hands, finding them in hindsight more gratifying than everything with Stacy after the surgery. He kissed her fantasizing about the day he'd be able to throw Cuddy up against a wall and crush his mouth to hers, spitting venom, showing her he wasn't as broken as they had made him.

Tired of the charade he finally told Stacy to leave, just once, and she did. She didn't question or argue or fight the way she always had. One day he woke up and she just wasn't there anymore. All of her things were gone. House found himself missing her toothbrush immediately, her pillows, her handheld tape recorder and the cassettes scattered around the apartment. Some days when he had the energy he would masturbate to the thought of Stacy's neck. The crucifix he was always staring at even through the most unholy moments and found himself wondering if maybe she was after all some sacrificial saint.

Cuddy never left him. Insufferably loyal, she was always there, standing at his side, enabling him, boasting her accomplishment, how far she'd come from the naive nineteen year old he thought would never survive med school. Proud, successful she always returned his calls, saw him when no other doctor would; the guilt made her better at her job. House made her miserable, trying to find an excuse to hate her, to forget her but still remained envious and angry, almost in love.

Suicide was always an option. As his self worth diminished he considered which strategies would be the most painless, the most effective. House basked in the irony of the women who 'saved' him discovering his lifeless body, knowing that they had murdered him more than anything, promised him only a life of chronic pain, suffering and addiction. Realizing he'd lost both of them, the only women he'd ever loved, ever wanted, who ever really meant anything, suicide seemed too easy. He wanted to die, yes. But he wanted to survive his suicide somehow. Kill only the man that could not forgive. The cynic, the nihilist, the bastard who pushed Stacy away, the imbecile who never kissed Cuddy. He wanted to be free of the consequences, force a metamorphosis, a reinvention-the grandeur, the aspirations, the histrionics of an existential renaissance.

Instead all he got was physical therapy, fewer conversations with Cuddy and a new apartment. It was winter by then and rehabilitation was debilitating. He attended one session of PT and after being told to 'visualize the healing' called the doctor a moron and never went again.

_**history (repeats itself)**_

Frozen pellets of November rain fell on his face, icy invisible tears as he strode across the slick parking lot on crutches, the pain spurning him to go faster than was safe. He'd gone a week without painkillers, making his last prescription stretch until he was licking the bottle in a cold sweat, desperate for relief. The physical therapist refused to write him a scrip since he abandoned treatment and House was regretting walking out now as the frostbite and bitter air did everything but numb the pain.

Sitting silently in the locked and unlit office of the new Dean of Medicine, he waited. After thirty excruciating minutes Cuddy came in to get her purse and coat, he stood abruptly but didn't speak.

"Jesus House, what are you doing here?"

"Actually the name's Greg. Thought you'd remember from Michigan. Or from a few months ago when you borrowed my favorite thigh muscle. Was wondering if I could have it back...And aren't you Jewish?"

"What do you want?"

"Medication. Believe it or not, my leg hurts."

"What did Anderson give you?"

"Ibuprofen, told me to stay off my feet."

"I'm not your doctor anymore House, you can't stalk me and demand that I give you opiates."

Without the energy to argue he leaned against the desk, malignant malice manifesting, ignominy, spite, tears brimming but stifled by thoughts of revenge and betrayal. They had been friends once, now they were nothing. No longer victim and perpetrator, no longer doctor and patient, they were amnesiacs standing mute and refusing to acknowledge history, remember their past.

How had they become this?

House left, throwing the crutches to the floor and feeling abandoned, defeated, lost. He thought of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus because he _believed_ in him infinitely: he couldn't wait for the miracle through which Christ was to have shown the Jews his divine power, so he handed him over to his tormentors in order to provoke him into action; he betrayed him because he longed to hasten his victory. Her motives were justified, Cuddy didn't want this to ruin him. Vicodin addiction would only make things worse, she just wanted him to heal, to work, to be again the whole human being she once adored. She didn't know yet that Stacy had left him or that House's life, as he knew it, was over.

There was no Judas kiss, just the sound of the office door slamming shut and the pathetic sight of him limping away, not really thinking she believed in him, not caring because the pain eclipsed concern, nothing else mattered, she knew that.

Later that night the ice storm came, snow and sleet soon followed. Cuddy drove without turning the heat on in her car, wanting to freeze the guilt, to share his misery. She had filled a prescription for him when she was still at the hospital and was trying to remember his address. It was only six or seven but the sky was already black, the road white and her conscience an afflicted shade of gray. She considered going home, waiting until tomorrow, until the weather had passed and the roads were clear but memory inspired her to take the risk, to jeopardize her Mercedes, her life, out of the loyalty that never died. Snow buried the surroundings, the real world was cobalt and charcoal as transient flakes destined to melt away reminded her of better days. A time when House was bitter, resentful and contemptuous for no good reason, when he had loved her so much he couldn't lay a hand on her, when they had almost kissed.

Finally she found his place, the car sliding and scraping against the curb as she parked. It felt like an ending, Cuddy had to acknowledge she had a part in ruining him, she had to save him at any cost.

Walking more cautiously than she had driven, she found 221B and upon knocking, the unlocked door opened on its own. It was dark and cold, no lights, no TV, no House. After another polite knock she stepped in, shoes leaving a slippery trail on the hard wood floor. Having finally found a lightswitch she turned it on to see him sitting on his couch unconscious with an empty whiskey bottle by his side.

Pathos, in just white boxerbriefs, House looked like he hadn't shaven for a month or bathed in a week. She stooped in front of him, took the bottle and stared. The thigh was healing, the muscle around the hollow indent seemed healthy, the skin was adapting to being reshaped, but peripherally she glimpsed the beautiful round quadricep of his left leg and sighed knowing he'll never have that again, just a puckered scar.

And pain.

Gaunt and hollow, it was clear he'd not been eating, now just weak pectorals and dorsals, obliques and bone, a sad shapely upper body, she wanted to reach out and touch his ribs, his leg, let her fingers fill in all the empty spaces.

Cuddy grabbed the prescription and poured a few pills into her hand.

"House," she said, fingers on his naked shoulder nudging.

The whisper woke him. The once sky blue eyes opened and she saw him looking at her as dreary and sullen as the weather outside. Cuddy handed him the vicodin and he took them, dropping his head back against the leather, not wanting to see her, righteous and gorgeous right there in front of him.

"You should lie down," she said, her voice tainted with a solemn solicitude.

House sat lifeless and ignorant while she searched and found a blanket. Covering him,

"If you need anything...from now on," she started, about to pledge allegiance, about to exercise her new power to protect him.

But he stood, vivified, endued, alive - and still a cripple he collapsed back onto the couch. It was a smug fall, with a virulent expression he looked at her, at last. Wanting to swear, to beg, to slap her, kiss her, thank her, he just looked at her and she knew.

Cuddy bent down, ringing his arm arm over her shoulders, helping him stand and started toward the bedroom. They staggered through the darkness together, four feet stepping on each other's toes, this was how it would start.

The room was open but impossibly black. Standing at the edge of the bed she found the lamp, turned it on and started to say something.

In an angry sweep House's arm pushed it from the night stand, it was sobering violence, the sound of it shattering startling and stimulating in an unexpected instant.

The filament flicked as the bulb broke. Now they were in complete darkness again. Blind, they stood as shadows disappearing into deception. Cuddy's raven hued hair faded into the pitch aura of night, he was blank, glaring - she could only see him reflecting off the effulgent iridescence of her own eyes.

House's hands clutched and framed her face, thumbs digging deep into the contours of her cheekbones. Indignant lips fell hard onto an unsuspecting open mouth, enticed by the forbidden taste his tongue thrust in penetrating infiltration, tangling with hers. Their first kiss was a ruthless invasion. Impulsive,vicious, urgent. Tracing across teeth, he held her face to his, unrelenting, certain no woman would want him now, demanding with force perfection, to be loved, to be seen as the idol he once was. Biting her lip in a wounding embrace he squeezed as she squirmed in the suffocating grasp, savoring the faint flavor of blood. Fierce, furious and determined to not let it be a fleeting regret he opened his mouth and breathed for her, never letting their lips part and then he kissed her again, sloppy, hungry, desperate for something more.

Viscid and vis a vis in complete darkness it was the end of a conquest. Cuddy tried to push away but he wouldn't let go he brought her closer, aligning torsos, grinding pelvises wanton and weak wrapped in each other's arms.

Fighting for freedom her body betrayed her. Breasts heavy, nipples almost painfully hard confined to the bra, panties wet, the humidity making it hard to breathe, the bulge of him restoring memories, a past. Nights when she'd fantasized about this, nights that she came just at the thought of such a passionate kiss with him. House was leaning, heaving and swaying now, she tried to support him but they staggered and fell back onto the mattress.

Together.

Cuddy was on top of him but not for long. With a surge of adrenaline House turned over, trapping her beneath his broken body and claiming her mouth, his serpent tongue lapping her shuddering line of lips, an abrading jaw scraping- flick, nip, bite until he was incising her bottom lip, then he descended. Warm small hands reached to cup his face, cradle his head but House intercepted them, bringing her arms high above her head, pinning them there against the sheets, two thin wrists fitting in his one strong fist. His scorching mouth returned to her chest while the other hand unbuttoned her blouse. With no light, just the studied memorization of her anatomy he found her breasts, scarred nose pushing them out of the bra.

Predator and prey, it was about control. He'd lost control of his life. This was his opportunity to regain it, with her helpless and struggling under him. It was revenge. If he'd had a scalpel he would have cut her open, removed something sacrosanct without her consent, robbed her of something vital, desecrated the woman the way she destroyed him. But this would suffice.

If he couldn't walk than he'd fuck her until she couldn't either.

The sweat in her eyes and blood in her veins were finally listening to him. He wanted to swim in them until he drown, her vulnerability seemed to unhinge him. The silent pleading in Cuddy's eyes only fueled his force.

On top of her his left knee was bent and between her legs, his right hanging off the bed. Anger, passion, pain, frustration, it was all finally culminating. In a merciless rise of rage House saw the woman that ruined him, not the girl he fell in love with. Crushing his mouth against hers so she couldn't speak his hips pushed into hers hard, bone and muscle and heat against heat. She thrashed beneath him, nails needling his bare back, scratching across shoulders, coming around to claw into his clavicle. The resonance of contact was revitalizing, raw, a brutality in the blackness, the blindness, the unstoppable.

Cuddy felt him. The coveted organ she'd related to his heart, throbbing against moist fabric, molding into her as if to dissolve, amalgamate, change the very composition of their matter.

House settled on her neck, kissing, sucking, chewing, preparing to exsanguinate his victim. Breathing, he found her again, the faint fleeting floral fragrance he first knew in a movie theater.

Then it wasn't violation anymore. It was incantation. House thought that by initiating the impossible he could reverse time, undo everything.

Rewrite history.

Cuddy's chest rose and fell under his, the beard exfoliating all of the soft flesh it crossed, he nipped her nose and she tilted to kiss him, it was a gentle kiss, a tender affirmation, permission to proceed. She was willing to sacrifice her dignity to relieve a little of his pain. Her reluctance became consensual; autonomy, control, possession- the entire scenario was redefined. Sympathy, guilt, pity now prevailing.

Some invisible law had been broken or amended.

Except House knew that there was no law, no design, no order. No God. Only her, only this.

Suddenly he could see again, a halo, a highlight, all senses heightened. The taste, the smell, the pearls around her neck, the sense of time was lost. Resentment, contempt, hatred, all evaporated. The context of the present had been abandoned, forgotten, erased by the vague but unmistakable glimpse of lost youth.

Love at first sight.

The girl he loved before he even knew her name was now his willing victim. With the interference of reminiscence wrath became shame and a precursor for regret. Visceral vengeance was alleviated. House stopped, released her wrists and pulled at the sheet until it was between them, covering her breasts and torso. He rested his head on her chest, arms loose at her sides and waited. It wasn't abdication, it was a test.

Now he wanted her to touch him, to wrap her arms around him, to hold him. He just listened to her heart, held his breath and waited. Cuddy had no idea what had happened, what he was doing or what he wanted. But he had to breathe. Her hands stayed above her head and she waited; for him to say something, to do something.

Finally he exhaled, rolled off and collapsed on a distant side of the bed. It was over. House just lay silent and defeated, tears welling behind closed eyes, ego demolished, one healthy muscle deflating.

He wanted to be rescued, not rape her.

The light of the stars streaked through a window making them just two friends again in a blue atmosphere of melancholy resignation. Absently House scratched his head, choosing a particularly thin patch of hair and had a vision of the bald spot it would be in a few years. Suddenly that vision was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that 'time passes more quickly than man can live', and 'life is terrible because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction'. Panicked, he felt paralyzed and old.

For that brief unguarded moment, House looked so desolate and damaged Cuddy thought she might weep, now she understood. The condescending genius that puked in her bathroom years ago was still there somewhere, she wanted to resurrect him, hold him, kiss him, save him. Make love to him.

Before she could speak his eyes were a calloused control again, staring with anesthetized despair at the ceiling as if it were a puzzle he would never solve, but could never stop trying. Homeless and hopeless, he was lost in the haze of the winter night.

On her side she watched as he started to doze off. Pressing her forehead against his bicep she kissed his arm, closed her eyes, took his hand and kissed him again. And again. Soft whispers of words up his shoulder, across his chest, lips resting on his neck she stopped. Something familiar about the opaque waves of hair spilling across his body, House opened his eyes and saw only the translucent compassion forming in the corners of her eyes. It was pain, not pity. She kissed his jaw near his ear, his cheek and chin. When her mouth finally found his House was cold, stiff, dead and resistant. He didn't open his mouth and tried not to even breathe, just hoped she would stop, leave, realize it was all a mistake. An attempt to assuage guilt, force retribution, remember the forgotten.

There was no finding lost time or recreating yesterday, no real recovery, not here, not now.

Cuddy continued kissing him, a sort of incessant revival, palliative affection, House watched, the fluttering fringe of lashes, closed eyes begging to bring him back to life. He saw it. When the guilt that transitioned into compassion and was long ago adulation became love. Platonic, romantic, unconditional. True love conceived, forged, reality before his eyes, on his lips, in his arms. At last he kissed her, because she wanted it, she wanted him and he loved her. Alive again, mouth to mouth, two bodies recapturing something they never really knew they'd lost.

It was regretful reciprocity, warm remorse, he cried out into her mouth, a confession, an apology, an ending. It was a strangled sob, weak and unworthy, his audible pathetic vow of solitude.

Outside the snow was burying their world, trapping them in circumstances they were being forced to accept. The wind blew in roaring gusts, but the frozen was about to melt, the unchangeable was about to alchemize.

With a slight nip of sharp white teeth and then a one last hard deep kiss Cuddy broke away, swollen lips found his jaded jugular, sucking then trailing lower. His chest above his heart, his ribs, she kissed all the way down his abdomen, across his stomach and stopped. It was a slow revelation, tugging at briefs she ran her mouth across the elastic, kissing every inch of his privy outskirts as they were exposed, hair, hips, the base of his hardening length. The cotton was pushed down until she could lick the crease of his thigh, kissing down and back up the inside of his left leg.

Finally a firm fist fit around his shaft and she lowered her mouth just above his glans, breathing out a hot moist mouthful of anticipation. Then she lowered her lips, his skin satin under her tongue, smooth and salty as she sampled the seeping sweetness, stroking lightly and descending, forcing more of him into her throat than she would have thought possible. Feeling his pulse under her wrist, rapid as he grew in her mouth Cuddy slid her tongue against the slit of his head following the fluid sensation with a sharp suck and House hissed before his fingers tangled in her hair, gripped her shoulders and urged her up to him.

With the graceful ease of a detached shadow she floated back to his side and remained poised, above him, bending to kiss his forehead as she slid out of her skirt and panties. Obscurity became vision, she truly saw House when he almost smiled, slipping the shirt from her shoulders, unblinking as the bra came off. It was a trusting exposure, his hand found her breast, finally touching her and she kissed him again. Every time it meant something different, something more, it was progress, an evolution of intimacy, assimilation of memory.

In a swift concise maneuver Cuddy carefully straddled him. A bent knee on either side of his hips, she tensed, acquiescing, feeling the heat of him against her - saliva, secretions slick and suffusing.

Memories rushed forth like feral waves to his awakening mind. House remembered remembering her when he was wearing her wolverine shirt, staring at the black and white print of the nameless girl he'd fallen in love with the summer before. He remembered remembering her when she became his doctor, when she suggested amputation, when she saved him. More than anything he wanted to remember this, the brevity of each blink as he struggled to see her, the sounds she made when he kissed her, the gravity of her on top of him, the pain in his leg paralleling the pain in his heart knowing this was it and it would only be a one night stand.

Now was all that mattered, it could be revisited, relived, he'd always have it. More than a memory, there'd be relief if he ever kissed her after tonight. He tried to forget the odds of 'again' and held her tighter.

Two mouths, one need. An elemental kiss, the strike of a match, a spark, the heat, the energy, the light- it was the start of a fire.  
Two lovers, one flame, igniting the inevitable.

Cuddy was consuming him, pale thin fingers tunneling through his hair she kissed his jaw, temple and eyes before she rose, palms pushing on his chest as she ground against him then lifted up a little and gripped, stroking his shaft.

Prostrate pelvises, her hair in his face, House was gaping, in utter disbelief of was about to happen, her lips fell onto his open mouth and he exhaled, like a fire in a closed room exhausts all oxygen and burns out, she opened a door reintroduced air, with effortless motion - backdraft.

Penetration was incineration.

Eight long fingers ran up her perfectly aligned vertebrae, thumbs in front feeling her ribs, finding her breasts. Chapped lips landed on her neck, licking, gnawing across her shoulder, waiting for her to move.

When he was completely inside of her she bent to kiss his chest, rest her lips on his heart and slowly began rocking. House met the motion with tandem trembling thrusts. On top of him, she had everything under control. His head bowed forward, lips lapping the sweat swimming between her breasts, tongue tasting the salty flesh, senses drowning in the smell of sex.

With the sting of a spontaneous spank House's hands gripped her ass, pushing up and then down, whetting enthusiasm until they were both slippery and smiling.

Cuddy looked at him, bracketing his face with her hands; the scar on his nose was more conspicuous, the gray in his hair was growing, his youth had faded but wasn't completely forgotten. In his eyes there remained something incorporeal, something like the glow that shines even after a star has burned out, it didn't matter that they had both gotten older, their past was still intact, the context, their history would always be behind his blue eyes.

House arched his back in an attempt to thrust and it became a gentle bucking, gratitude for gravitation as the slow ride continued. She lowered her lips to his again enjoying the way he tasted on her mouth and he loved her right then, right there. The woman was more than a fascination, her body was more than a fetish, her lips were an addiction. This Lisa Cuddy was more gorgeous than the one he remembered, exceeding the tactility, the divinity of any photograph he'd ever taken.

Calm, complete, she stroked a sweaty sideburn, kissing his grisled chin and almost whispered I love you. Tears were forming but she didn't know why, she wanted this, she loved him, but she knew it was destined to be a singular transcendence.

The snow falling flickered abstract alterations in the moonlight, painting her flushed body with shadows and white highlights. House thought he had never seen anything so beautiful and tried to fix the picture in his mind forever.

There was a timelessness to the night. When it felt like certain unreality he would press his cheek into the space between her shoulder and neck and inhale, kiss her, convince himself she wasn't intangible anymore. His fingers traced the curves of her body as though remembering how to play a nearly forgotten song, a tribute. Like keys on a piano, precise and fragile he knew which touch would create beautiful music and when she remembered their song his name fell from her lips.

It was raw reminiscence.

House lay cruciform after a while and her knuckles kneaded his chest, resurrecting him. What started as assault became affection and it was somehow healing him, more than medicine, more than therapy, more than time. The essential remoteness, the hopelessness were suddenly obsolete.

They found an inexhaustible rhythm and the cusp of ecstasy never receded. House's lips coasted across her chest, stopping over the rosy bud of a nipple and she leant down, pressing her forehead to his.

As his body stiffened in a spasm of imminent orgasm House panicked, gripped her hips and stilled her. Prudence was impeding his impulsive indiscretion. There was no condom, no commitment, just a little context and a handful of narcotics. The anxiety of the possibility of getting her pregnant intervened. He could hear the wail of an infant, with ten fingers, ten toes, a pink chubby miniature mixture of the two of them.

Then she kissed him, pulled away and moaned. A whimper, a squeal, a chokingly guttural growl. Hearing that sound he didn't feel handicapped anymore. He didn't feel useless or miserable. And he didn't care about anything except making her come; as hard and as impossibly intense as she was about to make him come.

Cuddy exhaled a sharp, vocal sigh as his hand slid from her hip to where they were joined and caught her clit with his thumb. All she could focus on was his palm and fingers as she lifted and thrust back down in a smooth lunge. There was an indescribable urgency as the long sought thrill approached. Fear, hope, sorrow, uncertainty and confusion cycled through her consciousness. She rocked against his hand writhing from the throbbing quintessence of him deep within her, salaciously satisfied by his impetuous touch.

They were fire again. Heat,light, energy, a chemical reaction, two blazing flares on the verge of dissolving into one cherry flame.

It was sublime escalation, the cerebral complexity of the pleasurable pulsating sensation of neuromuscular euphoria, a scientific response, suddenly seemed simple and in the same instant it became everything.

The waves of the ride were rapid, the romantic night waned as simultaneous silent pleas preceded a plateau. House drove into her as hard and quick as his injured body would allow, rolling his hips as she finally rested in the closure of his arms. The horizon of their torsos dissolved flesh into sweat as she lay level along the length of his tense body. Together they expelled one last gasp in anticipation of the obsolescence of individuality and then they kissed- the deepest, most desperate, most destined kiss. It was an apology, a promise, a connection that couldn't be broken; an eternal brand that changed who they were.

Oblivion, release, catharsis. Forgiveness.

House came, flooding, filling her with the essence of everything they'd wanted since Ann Arbor. Cuddy clenched, clutched, screamed into his mouth, shattering in his grasp.

The future became as certain as the past. House forgave her as she squeezed and contracted around him, tight - and with a kiss he forgot about the pain, he forgot everything except that moment, that feeling.

As she caught her breath on top of him they both absorbed what just happened, what finally happened, but what happens next was a vague and heavy weight.

The incandescent glow of their flame slowly diminished, what they had rekindled eventually extinguished.

House came inside her, it didn't feel like a mistake; a chemical, biological, physical fusion, it was a part of him she'd carry away.

Cuddy tried to kiss him but he turned his head so that her lips landed lower than his. House wanted the climatic kiss to be their last. He knew this would never happen again. The significance of their first and last kiss would only exist in the ephemerality on one unbelievable night.

They laid tangled and tired, drifting slowly into a prolactin lull, certain sated slumber. Cuddy shifted with him still inside her and he looked at her with a glance that saw everything. Motionless, she was perfectly dim and dazed and stared down in a sort of amazement at the tender nape of his neck. She stroked it gently and then kissed him, resting her head on his chest and listening to the beat of his broken heart.

Before she could fall asleep Cuddy found that she didn't feel guilty anymore. Not the same guilt, not as much. She loved him. Or rather she _still_ loved him. More than a doctor should, more than Stacy did. But did she love him enough to save him from himself? Did she love him enough to leave?

She had to leave because she had to hire him. She was beginning to see the sum of all coincidences. He ended up at her hospital for a reason, she ended up with the control, the ability to give him a job. This was how it was meant to be. When she rolled off of him and lay on her back she knew she had a choice to make: his happiness or hers.

Cuddy dozed off first. Her lips were a soft pout, cheeks lightly flushed as she slept a trusting, tangible and gloriously naked memory. After a while House curled an arm around her waist and stroked her back struggling to stay awake. He wanted to see her go, he wanted to wake her up and make her leave, he wanted anything but to fall asleep knowing she was with him and awaken completely alone.

He didn't feel sick or spent, he felt reborn, he felt alive for the first time in months. The trust, the vulnerability, the intimacy, he watched her sleep knowing he'd never have it again. And that's when he admitted that he loved her. House couldn't reject or resist or deny it any longer. Still, as he reassessed his philosophy of sex he realized that love didn't coincide with the carnal. No, the elusive emotion he decided made itself felt in post coital consideration, alas making love and sex irreconcilable. One a cause, the other an effect, different, separate, they may never intersect.

There was no transformation, no romantic science that could make gold out of metal. They couldn't even make diamonds out of coal years earlier. They had their chance and they missed the opportunity, now all they have is one night, lost time, the memory and pursuit to recapture it all.

Exhausted and relieved he fell asleep knowing she had to leave him.

-

On a cold morning with a little November sun they laid together as lovers. The light was round near the horizon, an opalescent haze with frost and snow beyond it the dim gray sky. Cuddy awoke early with her nose pressed against the pliant pink lobe of his ear. She opened her eyes and stayed close, kissing his graying bearded cheek and listening as he snored softly. Her toes warmed his cold feet and a hand splayed under the covers and across his abdomen.

She didn't want to leave.

Cuddy held his hand, fingers on his wrist counting off his pulse, torn still between what _she_ wanted and what _he_ needed. Bare in her arms, she saw House was half the man he used to be but more to her than ever.

She kissed his forehead, half hoping his eyes would open and he'd stop her. The goodbye did wake him but he didn't have the strength to speak. So she stood, dressed, suppressed tears and justified her abandonment.

It felt incomplete, there was remorse in her silent steps as she held her heels, not putting them on until she was on the other side of the door. When her hand reached for the knob she felt compelled to go back, undress, curl up beside him and hold the man forever.

In an effort to not sentimentalize the unsentimental morning after, she forced a strange sudden leap of sympathy, mingled with compassion that was tinged with regret, amounting to true unadulterated love. It wasn't romantic, nor did it coexist with copulation, but that love, that familiar, nostalgic emotion was what opened the door and let her leave. House watched as her bare feet tiptoed out of his apartment and the door quietly closed. He wanted to scream, to cry, to say 'Wait!' and confront the cruelty of deja vu. But deformed, disfigured, hideously desperate he just lay defeated, lost and alone again.

Guilt, pity, an impulsive reunion, there was no way she loved him. So he rejected the possibility and rolled onto his side. When he heard her car pull away he reached for his vicodin and swallowed a handful, laying limp and lazy eyed in borderline comatose contemplation.

Chaos theory, he thought, there's more to it than butterflies and weather he have asked her to stay? What difference would it make? In bed, in pain, all he could think about was the mistake he made years earlier. He should have kissed her then, in the hospital or at the piano, he should have kissed her a hundred times at Michigan.

If they were destined (or doomed) to sleep together it should have been sooner rather than later. When he had two legs, when he had a future, a career in front of him instead of medical and personal blunders behind him, when he still believed in alchemy.

House sat up after a while, crusted semen tugging on his pubic hair as he reached for his briefs. When he pulled them on, still sitting, he saw her lipstick on the elastic and thought he'll never forget that color, that shade - it was all just a memory, all it had ever been, all it could ever be.

And so it was that Lisa Cuddy was the one that got away. Twice.

As he stood, stammered into the other room and turned on the TV, House doubted that he was capable of stoically withstanding another loss, another woman, another mute failure and its resonating regret.

Soon though he would discover it wasn't a loss. It was a reward, an opportunity, another chance. Recurrence, the return of a system towards its initial conditions, chaotic symmetry and circularity- they were reunited, permanently, perpetually, fatefully. Circumstances and consequences would keep them together for more years than they could have predicted.

History and inevitability would eventually reconnect in one last convergent contingency, it was only a matter of time, a last chance and the right choice.

* * *

This was meant to parallel but contrast the previous chapter. Please let me know what you think.


	4. Return

Chapter 4/4 - Thanks for reading _please_ review

* * *

**III. Return**

The inconclusive flashback fades with the break of a new day. House spent the night in a state of nostalgic reconsideration, a robbed memory bank reminding him of emotions he'll never feel again, everything he wants that he can never have. Selfish really, because he has a patient.

The patient is in fact the reason for the recollection. Samantha Wagner, Roy's daughter, is a student at Princeton. She was rushed into the ER three days ago with a rather boring array of symptoms: headache, nausea, sensitivity to light. Symptoms she's had for weeks, symptoms misdiagnosed by four doctors. The ER was the first place that scanned her head. The MRI revealed a mass in an inoperable part of her brain, a mass that House doesn't think is cancer. Now she's his patient and he's struggling to forget about her dad so that he can cure the girl.

As he drives his bike back to work his mind wonders again - about the details of first being hired, what he knows and what he doesn't.

_**time travel and motion sickness**_

In the aftermath of their 'love making,' or 'sex having' or inevitable indiscretion several things happened that House, with all of his diligent deduction, remained unaware of.

Cuddy was late. And so distracted and consumed by her job and imminent elevation that the anomaly initially went unnoticed. But the calendar caught up with her and she sat home alone one night a little panicked and counting the number of days in November.

Morning sickness, motion sickness but no guilt or regret and the anxiety was over the uncertainty more than anything. She was a grown up, if she got pregnant she would be able to handle it. She wanted children one day anyway and to Greg House, the legend and the love of her life, it wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a miracle either.

The possibility added certain stress to her situation. Cuddy realized that in a few more days when she took the blood test, the results would change her life and her career. She may have to decline the offer of promotion, stop working completely for maternity leave, reassess what she wanted out of life _and_ have a complicated adult conversation with a convalescing, condescending narcissist.

A second occurrence (or recurrence) coincided with the week in the memorable winter that she held her breath, her birthday. Cuddy turned 32 and realized that if she was deemed Dean, she'd be the youngest ever and first female at PPTH.

It was her dream, her life long aspiration.

And so she was forced to confront two choices that would change everything: medicine or motherhood, hire House or have his child.

Ultimately it wasn't her decision to make, the waiting was the hardest part and with time nothing changed.

The blood came the day after her birthday, she fulfilled his prophecy of one day running a hospital and hired him within weeks, never mentioning the baby hope and never discussing their recent or long remembered past.

-

Fragmentation reigns.

When he was given everything he wanted, his own department, something exceeding a second chance (or rather a fifth) House sought satisfaction beyond his office and parking space. Still uncertain what he and Cuddy were, more than once he made an advance, a suggestion and not in earnest.

He'd corner her in the crowded clinic and slur some lascivious scenario into her ear or grind against her nipping her neck, making Cuddy a victorious shade of blush from the danger of being seen, the public display of almost affection. It didn't matter if they got caught, she was the boss now, the only reason she let it continue- she had control of the situation.

Eventually and perhaps predictably, House took it too far. She came to his office at the end of one day to find it empty. As Cuddy turned to walk back out House was standing in the doorway, crossed the threshold and closed the door. In a surprising swift and even stride he stood behind her, splayed a hand over her stomach and started unbuttoning her blouse.

"What are you doing House?" She asked squirming but not resistant.

"Trying to undress you, a little cooperation would be nice," he managed, kissing her neck and the corner of her mouth.

She could feel him, hard, alive, whole again throbbing against the contours of skirt confined cheeks, curving into a cleft. When he finished with the long row of buttons one of House's hands skated up to her breasts, the other found the zipper of her pencil skirt.

"Stop," her breath and body damp, weak and wanton.

The sound of the zipper was an epiphany, a few of his fingers slid inside her panties but her hand pulled his out. Flirting with an employee was one thing, being fondled and fingered in a dim room behind transparent glass doors would ruin both of them. It was more than a risk, it was wrong. Cuddy talked without facing him, buttoning her blouse.

"We can't do this now."

"Okay. How about my place, later tonight?" .

"No.

We can't do this at all. I'm your boss -"

"I know, I was planning to sue you for sexual harassment if you didn't put out. Again."

"Seriously, this can't happen anymore. It shouldn't have happened at all. I was your attending for God's sake."

Regret, rejection, House sat at his desk, picked up the tennis ball and finally saw how she felt about him.

"Alright. "

It was over before it even began.

After the concise conversation, the last ditch effort, they fell into their inescapable roles, interaction became professional, well as professional as possible. He'd joke about her perverse pleasure in rejecting him, building a barrier, the great wall between love and hate but it was never really enough. House knew she was pushing him away for his own good, that it was black or white with no gray alternative, that she still felt something.

The affair - their past - was more than conjecture or rumors. It was practically overt, more obvious than anything. Cuddy was the one responsible for the conspicuous inconspicuousness of their relationship. Her concern, her protection, her tolerance of House revealed not just that she loved him but that she was _still_ in love with him. Their rapport alone signified that they had slept together.

It was never a secret.

Over the years everybody has inquired, Vogler, Cameron, Stacy. But Wilson was the first to suspect. Boy wonder oncologist had been at the hospital a few years when Cuddy's administration commenced and was worried about the course of his friend's career's reincarnation.

"Did you and Cuddy...?" Wilson asked, walking.

"Yes," sarcastically "We did." House said.

Wilson's brow rose in tentative shock. House elaborated:

"It was all a terrible accident. You see I tripped and fell _in_to her.  
And then out of her. And then into her again. It continued that way until I finally stopped trying to stand up.  
Then she screamed. Or maybe it was more of a shriek. Or a squeal..."

"She's your boss now House, the exchange of bodily fluids is dangerous without a marriage license and a good lawyer.  
It could cost you your job."

"See, that's where you're wrong Jimmy. It's much more dangerous to live with the tribe in the amazon than to go on a chaperoned safari  
of a tourist trap."

"So you...went on a safari?"

"No. We didn't do anything. It's Cuddy, it's my boss. I'm not _that_ stupid," a lie motivated by the need to conceal his ineradicable love with a callous.

Cuddy however never denied sleeping with House. She dodged, deflected, clenched and sweat but never said no.

So for thirteen years there have been snide and satirical remarks about bondage, fun bags and red thongs- perjury, ketamine and hormone injections, an extensive timeline of sacrifices and consequences.

They never stopped loving each other. Cuddy kept him at any cost, one hundred million dollars, her own career and everybody lies on the witness stand and to health inspectors. She saved him, defended him and even cured him. House was never a burden, he was her best friend.

But she was only his boss.

Their personal lives remained mutually empty and incomplete. JDate and hookers, the return and rejection of Stacy, and a private investigator, nobody's really right. They tried and eventually accepted that they're meant to be alone, together.

A tacit and final fidelity.

-

It's all just sunsets in rearview mirrors now, beautiful but behind them. The metaphor works as he drives, two wheels on dry pavement. As long as he works for her it would be wrong, it would be complicated, it would be the greatest loss when it all falls apart.

_**tempus fugit**_

Roy Wagner did go to Hollywood. He became a director of photography and a pillar of the craft. He married a producer and had three children, the oldest of which is now House's patient.

The arrival of a forgotten face has forced Greg House, with all of his glory and disgrace to acknowledge the passage of time. Being numb from narcotics made it hard to remember and that made it easier working for her, being close and with her. Under her.

After the infarction the hope of being relieved only gave him the courage to suffer until the pills were swallowed. Then he remembered relief was only temporary and the pain, the scar, the loneliness were a permanent presence. Now is no different.

Every cripple must creep his own way.

And he does, parking his bike and limping to his office.

Samantha Wagner, nineteen years old and scared to death, does not look like her father. She's tall with wide blue eyes and thick bright blond hair. A History major with no sense of the significance of cinema, her boyfriend is at her side.

House enters her room for the first time since she's been admitted and stands silent.

"Who are you?" Sam asks.

A pause, a thought, identity reconsidered.

"I went to school with you dad."

House is staring at Samantha and her lovelorn bedside beau. He has no epiphany, no hope, only the thought of how different everything should be.

Roy is what House could have been. Cuddy's boyfriend, successful and sober and married with kids, he's normal, not alone and probably happy. Even his oldest child has more than House, someone who cares, people affected by her illness, who would miss her if she were gone. It's not envy it's just regret for inaction, for not saying something, not doing something then. A generational absence, now he's confronting how much he refused, how much he forfeited, how much he lost.

"House," Roy says, walking into the room with his wife.

"You're Dr. House?" Sam asks.

He nods.

"You look the same, Greg.

How is she?" Roy asks.

"She's sick," says House with his candor for the conspicuous.

"But she's going to be fine," he adds. It's more an observation than a prognosis.

"Are you sure?" Asks Roy's wife.

House nods again.

"I don't think it's TMJ _or_ a tumor," he says to her parents. Then to their daughter,

"I'm going to start you on antibiotics, if the pain subsides and the mass in

your brain goes away, it'll confirm my diagnosis."

"Which is?" Roy asks.

"An infection," House says, vacating the room.

Neither optimistic nor certain she has a abscess and infection House returns to his office vaguely relieved. He's brooding about a more personal puzzle.

They found the corner piece first, he thinks.

He and Cuddy formed a border at Michigan. A straight edge, a connection of strange shapes to frame their future, all they had to do was fill in the empty space to see the whole picture. But they never had a boxtop to reference, they never knew what they wanted, saw or had. Nubs, voids, color and a scattered pile of potential, now is the future and the puzzle is still incomplete.

They've gathered and rotated each piece, moving them together or apart, trying to make sense of the memory mosaic. Something's missing or lost, something they never had but the return of Roy is making the picture clearer. The kiss weeks ago was clarity, it was what he should have done years ago.

House is starting to see an image, something he hasn't considered since Ann Arbor. The relationship between the past and present is almost visible. Finding the last piece feels possible.

Except that a jigsaw puzzle is a finite object, a photograph, more tangible than the challenge that's before him, that's been unassembled for so long. Weeks ago he arrived at her doorstep, he kissed her and then he left. The next night he visited again, walking away, certain completion of the puzzle is an impossible illusion.

The analogy ends, hours have passed musing within a metaphor.

"Time flies," House says when he sees Cuddy approaching him.

"Samantha Wagner is getting better."

"A doctor treated a patient and she got better, what gross negligence. Are you going to fire me?"

"It was an infection, tests confirmed Gemella."

"Six weeks of ampicillin, she'll be fine."

A beat. Cuddy comes closer.

"You should go see her again, say goodbye to Roy. "

"I know he's a big Hollywood hotshot and everything but I don't even kiss my boss's ass. And besides, you're the one that slept with him."

_'Chemistry_', Roy thinks, watching them from behind the opposite corner at the end of the hall. They're lucky, in a collegiate atmosphere perpetually and with each other. They possess the rare comfort of an old friend's company yet they take if for granted.

"You did good, House."

"I did my job."

"I know."

There's an inexplicable smile stealing her expression. She loves him the most when he reminds her why she hired him, which is every minute she's with him.

"Where are you going?"

House walks away from her without answering, still thinking about jigsaw puzzles.

Cuddy watches, it's a struggle for him to stand but he walks, he works. There's something fundamentally Byronic about the man. She's almost forgotten his poetry was photography once. It seems so long ago but she remembers a fragment from a freshman lit class.

_When we two parted  
__In silence and tears,__  
Half broken-hearted  
To sever the years...  
In secret we met  
In silence I grieve  
That thy heart could forget,  
Thy spirit deceive.  
If I should meet thee  
After long years,  
How should I greet thee?  
With silence and tears. _

Cuddy walks back to her office with a melancholic lump in her throat, the poem is more than appropriate. It's accurate, it's timeless. Wilson was right about her contemplating the possibilities with House, she always has. And she always will, regardless of how it all ends. Now though, the stagnant inaction of the last five years is settling, a heavy restless weight.

-

House goes home. Spent, lost or wasted, time doesn't really do but bites heal, the itch he couldn't scratch years ago has returned, making the significance of a single kiss missed a relevant reflection, a stinging pain in the meaning of it all. He kissed her the day she lost Joy, it was impulsive and premeditated and perfect; it was what they both needed. It was that feeling he'd almost forgotten was everything, but it wasn't enough.

He wanted more than one kiss, so did she. But 'want' is a foreign feeling for them, continuing would have been complicated, irrational, maybe even regrettable and House couldn't take advantage, the same way he couldn't when they were in college. And through all the experience, the agony and irony of two decades, he still can't find a way to reconcile love and lust (or _them_, as a couple). It's a semantic argument of carnal complexities and empirical confusion.

Marriage and making love, relationships and having sex, it's all just different names for what he's missing.

Commitment isn't a piece of paper or a ceremonious patriarch accompanied processional, he thinks. Commitment is wanting to stay, but not having to.

And love, love is litany. It's loyalty and a lie.

Making love is the greatest misnomer of all. Implying emotion can be invented or contrived, summoned by connecting flesh and muscle, by executing a rhythm, it's ridiculous.

Having sex is vaguely more accurate, though sex isn't really 'had.'

It happens.

So many inaccurate descriptions and terms, sex remains an esoteric activity yet ordinary. A paradox impossible to describe and occasionally paired with emotion. A simple encounter between a man and a woman but complicated beyond explanation. Cyclical, kinetic, natural, it's validation, combination, everything and nothing. The experience he and Cuddy shared thirteen years earlier can only be defined as everything else: indescribable.

Words are utterly useless so he drinks and thinks.

After a few sips, House remembers again his strategy for discovering some absolute truths in a world of lies years before and goes in search of them.

The box of photographs, a collection of colorful polaroids and glossy contrasting blacks and whites, he doesn't remember ever throwing away, so he initiates a quest to find it, or at least a few stray stills.

Later that night when Cuddy realizes House didn't visit Roy again, she goes to see the patient and her father. Roy thanks her and tells her how far she's come. Sam's asleep and after his wife steps out he calls Cuddy 'Lisa' instead of 'doctor' and says how good she looks. A part of her wants to confess how far she is from where she thought she'd be, where she wanted to be when she first knew him. She wants to cry on his shoulder, to turn back time.

Before she leaves, he rests a hand on her shoulder and tells her he left earlier to go get something. Roy hands her a manila envelope and asks her to give it to House. Cuddy smiles and nods, she was expecting graft or some token to commence an affair but after a moment she chides herself. House deserves the gift, whatever it is.

She wanders past his office and is disappointed when it's empty. She doesn't peak in the envelope but can feel the shape, the rectangular case that's inside and knows what it is.

_**sleepwalking**_

Cuddy goes home late with the envelope forgotten and lost among her things. House and Roy and everything lately has gotten her frustrated, in a sexual _and _existential way. As her feet step through the door her only intention is opening a bottle of wine and curling up in bed with a glass in one hand and her vibrator in the other. She needs the relief, the release, the relaxation.

'Everybody masturbates,' she thinks, deciding it's more true than House's patented mantra about the human condition. Her shoes come off on the way to get the wine, one heel in the foyer and the other in the hall (the hallway where he kissed her, finally and again, the hallway where she kissed him. House said 'forget it,' she wonders if he has).

Cuddy gets a glass and the corkscrew and pours herself some burgundy, sipping as she saunters to her bedroom. The silence is satisfying but sad. A part of her still longs for the patter of children's feet, the sound of a cedar chair as she rocks an infant to sleep, the snore of a husband and his weight beside her, some constant, some sense of fulfillment beyond her career.

After lamenting her loneliness her libido lags and Cuddy decides to work, find something to distract herself from all the ordinary things she may always lack. She brews a strong batch of coffee to counteract the alcohol and sits on her bed buried in a pile of pillows and administrative papers.

In the pile is a manila envelope.

Drowsy but drifting into a caffeinated coma, she's beginning to consider and reconsider. Everything. What she and House could have been if he had kissed her twenty years ago, what they are after the passionate compassion of a recent 'goodnight', what they might have been if she'd gotten pregnant before she hired him, if she'd adopted Joy.

Still, they'd not even be together if she hadn't hired him.

It's not chaos to her, it's the sum of sacrifices and mistakes- sliding doors and the difference every detail makes.

Cuddy feels as if she's been sleepwalking for years now. Ambulatory but unaware, alive but ignorant, aimless with her eyes closed, any idea of direction has just been a dream. A black and white dream because she's made it one, she and House only opposing polarities in their colorless roles. She wants to feel something again, she wants spectral sentient and to not be colorblind anymore. She wants an awakening and she wants him.

Her eyes settle on the envelope and in a heartbeat she sees and feels the culmination of all contingency. The past and a patient at her hospital, the connection and revelation of everything she's lost, been denied, sacrificed, it's time to change things, or at least try.

-

On the drive there Cuddy' nervous. She shouldn't be, it's the middle of the night but he's called and come to her window or door no matter the inconvenience, so she's just returning the gesture. And she has a gift.

The only rational fear is being pushed away. There have been times when he wouldn't even let her in the door and she understands, exclusion is emotional preservation.

_**alchemy**_

Wide awake as she knocks and waits, she decides she's just going to deliver the disc and doesn't expect to be invited in. She'll be satisfied to see his face and know that he watched it. Maybe he'll call her and they'll talk, it's been a long forever since they had a real conversation.

Cuddy knocks again, an enthusiastic anxiety coiling in her chest. Footsteps follow the thud of his cane.

"What time is it?" House asks, opening the door.

"Late," she says aware of a certain subtext in the question and answer.

House closes his eyes and raises his brows, forcing himself awake.

"I brought you something," she says as he walks away from her.

The word 'kinky' echoes from a distance as he hollers and she goes inside.

The place is messier than it usually is, at least the few times she's been inside. Books and magazines are missing from shelves, boxes and crates are in the middle of the space. For a moment Cuddy panics imperceptibly at the thought that he's moving. But House limps out, hair tousled and thin, the grip on his cane tight, in a tshirt and pajama bottoms.

He's still here, just searching for something.

Cuddy's wearing jeans and House tries to remember the last time he saw her in denim. 'Partypants,' he thinks of saying for the first time since he discovered it was her password, but doesn't.

"Roy left this for you," handing him the envelope.

"Since when does the Dean of Medicine do midnight deliveries?

House opens it and pulls out a black dvd case. An eyebrow arches.

"Think it's porn?"

Shaking her head, Cuddy smirks and starts to walk back out the open door.

"Cuddy," turning her around.

"Stay," an involuntary invitation, a response to the sight of her walking away.

Uncommon sentiment stays in the air for a mutual sigh of surprise.

"He gave it to you to give to me, maybe he wants you to see it. And besides, you got me up, I might as well _keep_ you up."

"You were already up," she says as his friend again, no longer his boss, no longer in control.

Cuddy sits on the couch as House turns on the TV and puts the disc in. He returns and collapses beside her, suspecting but not knowing what's on the dvd. The leather's cold in the space between their bodies, a black gap they could easily close.

After a moment as the menu appears House reaches an arm low and behind her back and Cuddy thinks the distracted caress is an advance. Her heart flutters with a nervous excitement, a winged adoration she hasn't felt since she was nineteen. But the arm retreats quickly with his hand wrapped around a remote and he presses play.

The first few frames are unfamiliar.

It's celluloid. Telecined recently, the guileless glow is a diffused glimmer into the past. The colors have bled together, too warm, too soft, it's a stunningly accurate portrait of what they remember, vivid but fading at 1080p.

The titles appear and pass, it's Roy's thesis film.

Cuddy slouches, sinking deeper into the couch, creating a paradox in proximity. They're close but not touching, watching but not yet seeing.

Each excerpt appears followed by its collegiate parody equivalent. The privilege of driving and an alcoholic parallel parking, an educated explanation about sex and people having it, the digital transfer hasn't done the irony justice.

The sex shot of Roy's unwitting roommate and his girlfriend is more explicit than either of them remembers it being. House thinks of alchemy for a minute, certain there's no love in the act. Years wasted contemplating a coherent, cohesive connection between love and sex, past and present, employer and employee, now he knows there isn't one.

The scene is simultaneously arousing and depressing. Arousing because it's passion, release and loud. Depressing because it reminds both of them of what they could have done together, everything they should have had. The couple is on a bed, Roy's roommate is on top in control, his girlfriend's legs wrapped around his back when House experiences a certain envy in the position he took for granted, he wishes he could have been with Cuddy when he still had two good legs, when he was young, when it would have made a difference.

He's getting hard with a heavy heart.

Cuddy's equally affected by the misguided montage of memories. Like House she feels an anachronistic awareness in watching the film. The past is suddenly the present and they're out of place.

The scene is longer than they remember it being. House shifts, adjusting his rising erection and Cuddy looks away every few minutes. The gasps, the groans, the smack of sweaty stomachs, the sight of two underexposed individuals who, under different circumstances should have been _them_ is a final confrontation that makes them realize as much. Suddenly uncomfortable just sitting, they want to move, they want to make love, they want more than to just remember.

House is about to fast forward when the coital exhibition ends with its climax. The next contrasting comparison is one that they don't remember at all. It's an educational film about substance abuse produced by the University of Michigan. It focuses on narcotics and seems a little too appropriate for its audience. House goes to put his arm around her and make a joke but Roy's parodical funeral procession ruins the mood.

Cast shadows and false starts, the room suddenly seems dark. Reel time is making another eager error of enlightenment tempting but no less impossible. They're about to give up when the last juxtaposition starts.

The sight of the lake, the lake twenty years ago, is the most effective encapsulation of their shared past. The projection forces a final reflection, a synchronous reconsideration as they watch in silence. House puts an arm behind Cuddy, not touching but bringing them closer. Recent reality dissipates inside of him. In its smallest particles memory seizes his mind, his state and his state of mind.

They hold their breath, struggling to remember their roles in the scene. It's a green season as Cuddy stands on the shore surrounded by a group of peers, at home. She waves to someone on the water while everybody else drinks, collecting wood to build a bonfire.

The motion of her arm steals his attention and House stands transfixed and out of focus behind her. It's clearly more than curiosity, it's even more than they remember. There's something in his expression Cuddy's never seen, not for years if ever. An instantaneous appreciation for filmmaking, for photography and for college consumes her. She understands now why he used to take so many pictures.

-

Truth needs distance not context, House thinks.

Context distracts, distance provides focus.

The observation is influenced by the objectivity of distance. In the film he's farther from her and the empty space allows for honesty. Here they're close, too close and considering context, they can't be honest.

His philosophy is interrupted by the thought of where the pictures might be. He may still have the old Pentax somewhere, not that he has much worth photographing anymore. Looking at Cuddy through the corner of his eye though, he regrets his inability to capture this moment.

The camera is the only machine that can trap time. Film is flypaper for moments of truth, a negative the time capsule that transmutes the transient into the tangible, the unforgettable, making a photograph a kind of message in a bottle. Now only a lament of isolation and loneliness; not from the loss of a love, but the lost image.

A confession was sent but never received. The camera was communication.

He longs for it again almost as much as he longs for her again.

The still image is inspiration, House realizes, staring at her and not the television, but the moving image is _proof_. It's evidence, it's everything. Visible, intangible but real nonetheless, the only way to really relive the past.

They share a temporal and literary aside, reminded of Proust and his magic lantern, compressed ephemera, gaussian impressions of remembrance and recollections. The best days of their lives are no longer blurred, no longer lost, they've returned here and now, fragmented but full circle.

Young love softens aged doubt, the pathology of the present is uncertain as they sit with questions and conversations pervading their consciouses.

"That summer at the lake..." Cuddy starts.

"It was fall," he corrects with a sad nostalgia tainting his voice.

Cuddy tilts her head and thinks. House is right. She continues with more certainty,

"I remember the thesis screening. It was ninety degrees that day..."

"June."

"And they had us crammed into that theater."

"I think that was the last time I shaved," rubbing his chin.

"You didn't shave that day either. You were hungover."

House laughs, a crooked smirk shaping.

"Young, naive Cuddy really had a thing for me..." he says, both knowing it's an incomplete thought, an open observation as much as a question.

A beat, an awkward transition.

"It's too late, I should go," her only rational response, a few fingers on his left leg are an unexpectedly intimate ending.

Cuddy looks up and blinks as she stands, dispelling any evidence of tears.

"I still love you, House," under her breath and to herself, his name almost audible as she starts toward the door.

"Wait," House says. It's only taken thirteen years.

He walks over to her quickly, forgetting about any handicap, any injury other than his broken thoughts and fractured heart, every affliction only she can cure. There's no reluctance, no limp just bare feet on mahogany and an overwhelming desire to stop time.

Their eyes meet and they stare together, alone in space a few surreally suspended moments. His arresting blue eyes seduce her gaze, the weakness and wisdom are behind them still. House's hand rises to her chin less cavalierly than when he was twenty six.

"What are you doing?" Cuddy asks quietly.

His lips part and his glance shifts as if only now he recognizes her as someone he knew long ago.

"Making up for lost time," a listless whisper. He kisses her but it's no goodnight kiss.

It's a soft almost sentimental defeat to magnetism. They feel the thrill, the fear, the end of inevitability. With closed eyes and a few fingers on the small of her back he can taste coffee and wine and toothpaste on her lips. It's impulsive and eloquent, her mouth opens wider and her hands frame his face, thumbs stroking the tender rims of his ears. House's tongue takes a chance and tangles with hers and she opens her eyes, motionless, holding her breath, watching him kiss her in utter disbelief. She blinks one last blink, dissolving into his arms.

The whim becomes a whammy.

The embrace evolves. A desperation, a tide of mutual urgency has finally crested. The recognition, the familiarity of the nearly forgotten feeling, there's a security, a certainty in what's beginning, what began so long ago. It's return, the culmination of hazard and vulnerability. They walk backwards to his bedroom, neither leading but both acknowledging another alchemic attempt.

-

Streetlight seeps warm almost romantic highlights through the window, contrived candlelight in an otherwise blue room. House sits on the edge of the bed, hands rising to Cuddy's hips as she stands in front of him. Slowly unbuttoning her jeans he kisses her stomach. It's the closest they've been with anyone in years.

In the dark they're ageless, just a familiar presence, a lost love, old friends. They can pretend that history hasn't already been written, that this is more than a second chance. Or a third.

Lips linger as he remembers a dream, a dream of dreaming. His gust gives her goosebumps as the air ebbs down her body. House starts at the bottom, undoing the long line of buttons on her blouse. It falls slowly and as he tugs on the zipper of her jeans they tumble. Before she can step out of them he kisses her again, a hip, her belly button, his beard burning across her abdomen.

Cuddy sits on the edge of the bed and kisses him, her hand sliding under his shirt, he's sweating. He's nervous. House unhooks her bra, feeling sixteen and almost shy, slipping it from her shoulders. Tugging the shirt off his upper body she plants a wet kiss on his neck and bare chest with one last peck on the lips before she lays back on the bed.

Now she sees it. The little boy and everything she imagined Greg House once was, the little boy his child would be and everything he is. Leaning on top of her, his laconic glance says everything in a blink, a breath, a heartbeat. The next kiss rouses a longing so deep it affects her womb.

Cuddy's hair is down and mussy, her makeup is all but worn off completely but there's a majestic beauty, an eternal youth he sees in her, almost wishing they had married a long time ago so that her graceful aging might have been his benefit.

House's lips brush over her sternum and ribs, the ticklish spot low on her shoulder, he kisses the bend of her arm and strokes a soft elbow, ascending up to her erogenous ear. It's a slow rediscovery ending when his mouth finds hers and he stares into her eyes, stares past them, seeing everything they could have been but not what they still could be.

Feeling lost, feeble, invisible again House rolls onto his back, certain this is impossible. She's his boss, but that's not really what's stopping him. If he can't make it work with her...

She's the love of his life, he couldn't survive the loss, his mind's in anarchy at the thought. He can't take the chance.

In voiceless sorrow, leaving the words unsaid, they're side by side. His lazy arrogant confidence is dim and disappearing replacing desire with dread. A sigh and he's suddenly aware of his own mortality. Life and death and he never found the box of pictures, he never found anything he's ever looked for. The search is over leaving him wondering where his camera is, knowing he's only ever been a spectator. But he wants to be more. He wants permanence without a photograph, without a word, he doesn't want this to be another one night stand.

It's a somber sobriety knowing tonight could never be anything more.

Cuddy touches him. Her hand splays across his stomach and she waits. She knew it wasn't going to be easy, nothing's ever easy with him. Still she has to let him know there's no regret, there never was, that it's worth taking the risk. She holds him close a while, a sort of embraced exposure. A few fingers coast down his cheek and she turns his face to hers, kissing his chin, the corner of his mouth and resting her head on his chest.

Time passes and she hears his heart beat faster and faster. His fingers are trailing up her spine to her arm, bringing her hand to his lips. House accepts it as whatever it is, if only another singular transgression. His eyes beg for it to be a second chance as kisses her softly, letting her know.

Cuddy's head rises and she slides out of her panties, returning with a long deep kiss. House's hand finds her clit, tracing then rubbing in a spot that coats every finger and makes her bite his bottom lip. She massages him through the cotton and he swells. Hovering over him, she kisses the scar on his chest from the bullet and then the one on his neck. Her lips rest on his forehead over the scar from the bus crash and kiss the one on his nose from his first bike accident. There's a flawlessness in his flaws, all of his scars are remnants of wounds, reminders of pain, brands of hopelessness.

Her body descends his, tongue circling each nipple, slippery across his ribcage stopping at his navel. The pajama bottoms are pulled down and tossed aside. Cuddy kisses along the elastic of his boxerbriefs sliding a finger in, making House jerk as her fingers brush through hair and pull out, her chin a faint caress on his growing girth through the fabric. The briefs slide to shins, freeing his beautiful crimson shaft.

A hand takes the throbbing pillar between her eyes, close to her lips and she feels every muscle in his body tense under her. The hair spilling over his sensitive skin is a torturous tickle and he watches, gaping in shock and suspense. One hand wraps around him and then another. The grip is familiar, a reminder of the tragedy of thirteen years before. House wants to feel dejected, he wants to feel miserable because all the scene reminds him of is the infarction and Stacy's abandonment but he just feels unbridled anticipation. She strokes him to a straining stiffness, twisting her wrist, languidly lapping the underside of his length. The pace quickens and then stops. Nuzzling his thighs and massaging his testicles, her touch is soft.

House groans, foreboding fluid flowing out of him and Cuddy licks it up with the return of her talented phalanges. He starts bucking into her grip, trying to push himself between her lips but she won't let his manhood meet her mouth except for a moist plump kiss on the head.

Rocking erratically, he prepares to surrender to her dedicated hands when they stop again.

Cuddy takes him in her mouth, unexpectedly engulfing him entirely and hearing his guttural grunt. She strokes and blows, feeling the dangerous ripple course through his body. She sucks hard and almost does it again, wanting to keep it simple and just swallow and sleep but she can't bring herself to end it here.

So she rises, the salt of his sweat gloss on her lips, looking almost innocent.

"Lise," House starts, winded and hoarse, with a lisp that she's missed.

But she kisses him, smothering any protest, any doubts. Drowning in the prepossessing scent of the woman, the girl, a waft of years gone by, he kisses back speechless and spellbound.

Cuddy straddles him, kissing still, never letting her lips leave his, making everything that follows an extension of the kiss.

Fingers curl around his shoulders and she just savors the taste of him, the safety, the illusion of him beneath her again. The slickness of her arousal saturates them both as her hips sway on top of his, seeking a certain pressure. He's not even in her and she's close, grinding and writhing and making out with a bleak fury, the urgency of every year, every minute they were doing anything else. Her pelvis presses harder against his, the wet glide a mounting tension and he quavers, making her moan.

After kissing his temple she pulls back rising, seeing him with a renewed clarity, seeing a potential, a promise kept. The future's indefinite, the past is perpetual and the present is the only thing that matters at all, she thinks, smiling under just enough light to see the ocean blue hue of his eyes.

Cuddy bends down raking her nails through the growth of stubble in the hollows of his cheekbones and cradling his cherished countenance in one palm while the other seeks his seeping shaft, stroking as she lifts, leading him to her, guiding him in in one smooth submersion.

The solid thick pulsing heat of him fills her, familiarly fantastic. It's been so long since she's had him over, under, inside of her that Cuddy comes on contact, convulsing, clenching and he swallows the echoes of her suffocated scream.

It's an aural allusion, that sound she makes that forces him to forget about everything except her, the smell, the sight, the syzygy of senses. He thrusts, deepening the connection, prolonging her pleasure, watching her squint and squirm. The pleasure's sharp, she arches her back as euphoria becomes desire again, then clings to him, still, burying her face against his neck to compose herself, kissing with a persuasive passion until she starts moving slow, feeling the resonating reverberations of their reunion.

They find a soothing ancient rhythm. Cuddy's legs align with his, a long sought symmetry coming to a kinetic compromise.

Riding, reviving, remembering, they build a relentless bliss. His beard grazes her breasts, tongue teasing a nipple as her beautiful body bounces above his broken frame. Belief and bondage- a tie to the past and faith in the future are in exhilarating equilibrium.

There's a delicate balance of strength and restraint in the instant they realize it may be their last reconnection and pledge an unspoken promise to make it perfection. Relief, exhilaration and anxiety dissolve into sexual synchronicity, as muscle and sweat and soul and flesh coalesce.

Possession and protection- this is more than sex, House thinks, driving into her and pulling down on her, coming together again and at last. The impact of integration and momentum of every fleeting moment make reciprocity more than a regrettable reaction, they're on the verge of achieving the impossible, a hope he hasn't felt since his accidental poetry was photography.

There are no poetics in sex, just science, House tries to convince himself, jutting up, watching her shudder at the sensation, trying  
to calculate her refractory period, uncertain if he can make her come again before he erupts.

With a palm spread against his chest Cuddy feels the strength of his heartbeat and the vibrations of his words, whispered vowels suppressed for years, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead then her lips. She shifts above him as he moves inside her tilting so that he hits that place, that anatomical apex only he's ever known existed, harder. House has one hand on the small of her back and the other cradling her breast as both hands drift lower, four fingers molding into a dimpled cheek magnifying the magnificently fluid friction of each thrust while the other draws spirals around her clit.

The intuitive touch shatters something inside of her and Cuddy starts to let go again, every muscle a constricting clench around him, her toes curl and thighs tense but House stops her, steadies her hips and procrastinates, terrified now of this ever ending.

Nothing has changed, they're still just immutable base metals begging to be treasure, to shine and combine with appreciated affection, the context of the price, a precious past. But it takes love over logic to defeat lust with trust and he knows that what they have can be a mined memento or run through his fingers like dust.

It's a long beat, a stagnant spectacle as they ease back from the edge.

In silence they hold each other, trying to hold their breath, trying to reverse the direction of time. His calves are cold, the sheets are damp and their hearts are still. Within the overwhelming return to his arms Cuddy tries to speak but House kisses her, muffling the message into a humming hyperbole, knowing what words now would mean.

When their lips unlock they start moving again, closed eyes concentrating on controlling the uncontrollable, succeeding in sweet shallow slowness, bound and becoming one.

It's not carnal, it's simple. It's happiness. Each kiss is a smile, a glance, a lifetime flashing before their eyes as a phenomenal night nears its end. With reverential recognition they accept the unexpressed and accelerate, remembering as a new memory's made.

She's tight, he's deep, lips on her fervor flushed cheeks as he starts pumping into her faster with a ferocity for infinite fusion. Cuddy sprawls across his torso, kissing, panting, slowing him with her leverage. She stares at him in abstracted awe, eyes half closed in pleasure, in disbelief, climbing towards climax.

The rise and fall of his taut trim boss and her salacious squeeze on him is making House care less about science and logic and everything except the revitalizing recurrence of simultaneous rapture. He shifts, rolling his hips, holding her tighter, somehow reaching an impossible depth. Then he kisses her, long and deep, merging motion and emotion.

"I love you," Cuddy says, a breath of honesty between them.

The rush consumes her again, soaring, surging, escaping as she rocks relentlessly, eyelids fluttering, muscles clutching, she comes apart with a sob, a sigh escalating into a scream, repeating the three words into his mouth, she elevates the enduring elation.

Incapable of resisting the exchange of energy any longer House thrusts, transcending, recapturing and finally understanding- time, her, everything.

With the rise of House's release, he sees there's nothing to change, no impossible transformation, no triumphant transmutation because what they've had all along was gold.

It's always been chemistry, never alchemy.

He lifts his head and kisses her, a compensatory kiss for everything he never said, it's completion, holding her closer as he comes - a gushing, searing, white hot stream of consciousness, of the awareness that they've always loved each other, that they always will.

-

They're still connected long after ecstasy becomes reality. His hands have gone from her hips to her neck, holding her to him as orgasmic continuity transitions back into an endless kiss. Cuddy breaks it, breathless and blind now that the room is black. House pushes a stray strand of hair out of her eyes as she rests on his heaving chest. After a few minutes she tries to roll off of him but he holds her tighter, refusing  
to disconnect.

By not letting go House is saying I love you without saying a word. Cuddy listens to his heart with her heart and falls asleep in his arms knowing nothing else.

_**after the gold rush**_

The fear of her leaving him again almost eclipses the experience of love and sex coexisting. A philosophy has been disproved, debunked or redefined and his all consuming concern is the loss of the only person who made him an exception, the only exception herself.

Stacy, hookers, every other woman was different and wrong and it's not simply because of context or history. It's because of chemistry. Atomic attraction, elemental bonding, the composition of matter - they've been united and reunited, lost and found, incapable of settling for anyone else, settling with anyone else.

House holds her knowing the truth but not knowing if he can do anything about it. All that glitters is not gold- she said she loves him but everybody lies.

__

The first rays of a new dawn penetrate the horizon, linear illumination through closed blinds. Reflecting off their gilded past, shining on their golden present, the potential for an aureate future accompanies the soft light. House never let go, now on his side behind her, a knee bent between hers. His arms are a reminiscent ring as his dry lips rest on her shoulder, he looks and decides there's no sight more beautiful than her bare toes at the bottom of his bed.

While she sleeps he considers the mis en scene of the room. It's photographic if not cinematic. She's nestled in his embrace, gorgeous and glowing with an amber halo, pale, warm, naked against him. They're a tired tangle of sheets and limbs. A pile of clothes is stacked beside the bed: her bra, his tshirt, high heels at the bottom. The TV is still on in the other room and only now does he catch the flicker and long to watch something with her again. This morning doesn't feel like the morning after, it feels extraordinary and it sounds like home with birds and traffic waking up. He's not alone and sighs at the thought, almost happy.

The exhausted dean stirs and her yawn consoles him. House loosens his hold, unclasping his hands, caressing her curves, letting her know he's awake (_and in love_). Cuddy goes to say something but he stifles the sound.

"Shhh," she hears as House lifts the long dark waves of her hair and kisses the back of her neck.

His mouth is warm and his arms are strong and with his sentimental insistence she falls asleep again and he soon dozes off, still trying to not let go.

------------------------------

After hours of shared sleep, recuperating from the rare intersection of the physical and emotional, lust, love, past and present, House wakes. The space beside him is cold and his arms are empty. Defeated and disappointed but not surprised, he closes his eyes and contemplates why she left him, again. Years of resistance, the pain of repetition, he can't define what they are.

Lovers, colleagues, classmates, nothing is exact.

Like a child repeating a grade, there's something remedial about their relationship, a puerile interference, a proverbial schoolyard hostility and the longing to be forever young.

Perhaps they're more like a broken record, an antiquated and dismissed relationship, sex has scratched and distorted their delimitating melody, leaving only a damaged destiny.

Looking toward the window he wonders if it's more like the cyclical aesthetic of sunrises and sunsets; paradise, visible but unattainable heaven separated by intervals of darkness.

Or a reoccuring dream, he thinks, wishing he never woke up.

No analogy fits, they're all too dismal, too hopeless to be accurate.

What they have revolves, it's temporally, fatefully circular. It's a contagious kismet they keep catching but his differential is inconclusive. So he thinks a while longer, alone, his mind adrift on what again could have been.

"You're a boomerang," he finally decides, trying to visualize his most coveted picture of her, that fear of losing him on her face, now what he feels.

"You will return to me," a meaningless murmur to himself, not optimistic but knowing he's right.

Satisfied with his diagnosis House rolls over, covering himself with the comforter, occupying only one side of the bed still, almost hopeful.

-

Before he drifts into a dream (or a propane fueled nightmare) he hears water running but ignores it, drowsy and depressed, convinced it's a neighbor. Minutes later the creak of a door opens his eyes, he sees her bare feet beside his bed and smiles as she crawls back in to lay beside him.

Cuddy lies facing House, hearing his soft snore, her head sinking into a pillow, her hand on his, the curl of their bodies like two perfect circles intwined. She thinks about Ann Arbor and last night and tomorrow.

Resistance, repetition and return, a trinity of inescapable truths.

She wonders what he wants and if anything will change, what's possible and what's not now. She wants to marry him, make love again, she wants more than the memory of Michigan and these moments.

The dream of dreaming is reality.

It's true, she loves him. She stayed. Cuddy's smiling as she strokes his

his hand. House wants to kiss her, he wants to scream 'I love you,' say anything she wants to hear and everything he ever substituted with silence. He wants to sleep. The trust, the vulnerability, the truth he has at last, he wants to fall asleep _knowing_ that the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes will finally be her.

They're another day older but a golden age, in the middle of their lives and together again. House will cut himself shaving later, a little bleeding in an attempt to be again the person he once was. He'll buy a camera but never forget the remiss kiss missed or anything that might have been. Soon he'll hold and see what is.

What he wants to be is a latent image they can only develop together.

He knows they may never have more than this, no matching bands on their ring fingers or the simplicity of a spinning mobile above a white crib, but they have today, they've always had gold and they'll always have each other.


End file.
